[couchand]

Panic is perfectly fine in certain cases, but it's absolutely not a general error-handling mechanism for Good Programs (TM). (Some contexts excluded, horses for courses and all that)

You can and should recover from bog standard IO failures in production code, and in any case you'd better not be panicking in library code without making it really clear that it's justified in the docs.

If your app crashes in flames on predictable issues it's not a good sign that it handles the unpredictable ones very well.