This ticket specifies the behavior of the MPI library after a during MPI_INIT. Basically, if there is a failure during INIT, the library should return an appropriate return code and calling any other MPI function (with a few exceptions) is erroneous and will trigger the error handler for MPI_COMM_WORLD, which by default is MPI_ERRORS_ARE_FATAL and cannot be changed in this instance.

Again, this ticket has no discussion attached to it. I remember some discussions from the RTS proposal days, but I don't remember the results of any of those discussions. Can anyone else bring this back to light?