[Audacity-devel] 1.2.0-pre1 ate my data

[Paul A. <al...@nw...>]

If I open a project that was created with 1.1.2 in the new
1.2.0-pre1 on my RedHat 7.3 box, Audacity removes all of the
.au files for the project and then complains that there was
an error opening the project file.

I started by doing a "chmod -R -w *" on all my audio data.
Then I started trying to open various old projects.  Data
created with 1.1.1 (with .auf files holding the audio)
seems to open OK.  When I open a write-protected project
created with 1.1.2, Audacity says, "An error occured while
opening the project file.  Some audio may not have been
retrieved."  I ran Audacity under strace and noticed that
it was calling unlink(2) on all of the .au files and getting
"permision denied" errors before it showed the error.

So, I says to myself, "Perhaps it needs to convert formats
and needs to be able to write?"  So I backed up my data, turned
the write bit on, and ran Audacity again on the 1.1.2-created
project.  I got the same error, and now all but four of the .au
files in the data subdirectory are gone.  (Yeah, all but four.
That was really surprising.)

Is this expected behavior?  I built Audacity 1.2.0-pre1 and
all of its dependencies from source.  I think my oldest data
was recorded with 1.1.1 and the newer stuff with 1.1.2, but
I can't be certain.  I do know that I never got 1.1.3 to
compile, so I can't have any data created with it.

On a side note, it took two and a half lines of --with-foo
arguments to get configure to build with all of the various
libraries I had available.  For some libs, configure assumed
that it had a local copy in lib-src and then failed at make
time when it tried to cd into lib-src/libfoo.  This was
somewhat surprising.  I had just finished building the new
version of VideoLan and all of its dependencies, so most of
what Audacity needed was in /usr/local/lib where configure
could have found it.  Instead, I had to trip over each library
sequentially and add a --with-foo=system clause to my configure
command and re-do the make.

I haven't tried recording any new data yet.  I'll try that
soon and report any oddities I find.

Thanks for a great program.  I'm counting the days to a stable
version that I can just use for a while.

Paul Allen