OpenSSL Security Advisory
<i>> OpenSSL will attempt to find an alternative certificate chain if the first attempt to build such a chain fails</i><p>I think the latest big thing I've learned in my career is that trying to fix broken input data silently is always bad. Fixing stuff silently isn't helpful for the callers, it's very difficult to do and it produces additional code which also isn't running in the normal case, so it's much more likely to be broken.<p>Additionally, your callers will start to depend on your behaviour and suddenly you have what amounts to two separate implementations in your code.<p>I learned that while blowing up (though don't call exit if you're a library. Please.) is initially annoying for callers, in the end, it will be better for you and your callers because code will be testable, correct and more secure (because there's less of it)