Re: [liblo] [ann] liblo 0.27 released

On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 8:51 AM, Stephen Sinclair <rad...@gm...>wrote:

>
> >
> > Perhaps I haven't been clear enough. I don't know the cause of the
> breakage.
> > This is the situation:
> >
> > When liblo 0.27, myself and several distro packagers tried it. I was
> excited
> > about the possible performance improvements. However, when liblo 0.27 was
> > installed, the OSC functionality stopped working in every program on the
> > system that used it--they all had to be recompiled against 0.27 in order
> to
> > work. Now, you can call that what you will, and it's true that I never
> > investigated the issue thoroughly enough to get to the bottom of it. If
> not
> > an ABI change, it certainly had the same effect as one.
>
> Okay, but this seems like an expected cycle for me.  I put out a
> release, distro maintainers test it, and then report back that it's ok
> for inclusion.  If it's _not_ ok, I hope they have the sense not to
> include it and instead report some bugs upstream, which is what's
> happening now.  I'll fix them and put out 0.28, and everything is
> dandy.  In the future I'll use RCs for this purpose.  I didn't think
> it worth it this time since all tests checked out for me, which was
> obviously a mistake.
>
> So I am not that put off by what's happening now, but I only wish
> people wouldn't take it as a bad sign, but rather as a normal part of
> the development cycle.  Calling it an RC would have made this clear.
>
> What I did take exception to was only that there was apparently a big
> discussion about the release on a separate mailing list and the first
> I've heard of it is after the software has been removed from the
> project.  (Why? If 0.26 was working fine, just keep it, and report the
> bugs upstream.. communication, people!)
>
> By the way, what performance improvements are you referring to? I
> don't recall including anything about performance improvements in the
> release notes.
>

Not doing a DNS lookup every time the message source address is checked
would be a performance improvement. I thought I saw that in the release
notes.

Anyway, that is what I did (I'm still running 0.26 personally). As to the
comments on forums you don't read...  Well, everybody has an agenda. And
sometimes a forum has a lower barrier to entry than a sourceforge
bugtracker. FWIW I started getting more and better bug reports when I
created an account on github.com, but it's always gonig to be a struggle to
get people (even other developers) to jump those hurdles.


>
> > I apologize for not bringing it to everyone's attention sooner--I figured
> > that since the problem was quite obvious it was either intentional or
> would
> > be noticed quickly. I maintain too much software of my own to be able to
> > spent a whole lot of time debugging other projects.
>
> It was only "quite obvious" if it actually triggered on your system.
> I guess my particular testing platform didn't trigger this bug, or my
> testing methodology was not good enough.
>
> Anyways, mostly my testing consisted of "make test".  I also used
> "icheck".  I admittedly didn't do a lot of "install distro X and
> replace the liblo binary" kind of testing.  This takes time and
> resources, which I don't have.
>
> Steve
>

Yeah. It could just be another 32-bit vs 64-bit issue. /me misses
sourceforge's compile farm. I believe ubuntu has some automated test
systems available now and I heard that opensuse just came out with
something similar. Might be worth looking into. I too have had my fair
share of frustration with packagers not reporting problems upstream, but
we're all busy people.