Re: [Plplot-devel] Should we delay the release by a week?

[Hezekiah M. C. <hez...@us...>]

On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 11:49 AM, Hazen Babcock<hba...@ma...> wrote:
> Alan W. Irwin wrote:
>> (1) The above command-line parsing issue.  The valgrind investigations I
>> suggested for this case may allow you to find the reason for this error and
>> fix it in a relatively small amount of time. Do you have time to work on
>> this before the weekend of September 12th/13th?
>
> I can try, but since I am the only one who seems to run into this
> problem and I have a pretty vintage OS-X box (32bit PowerPC, OS-X 10.4)
> at this point, I don't attach much importance to it. Also, remember that
> this only effects the xcairo and aqt drivers. I guess if I could figure
> out how to pass command line arguments using gdb I'd be willing to try
> that and see what happens.

To pass command line arguments in gdb, add them to the "run" command.
For example:

$ gdb ./x01c
<gdb copyright and other output>
(gdb) run -dev xcairo

That should be equivalent to running "./x01c -dev xcairo"

>> (3) plend/xcairo segfaults on all (?) platforms.  Certainly, I see this
>> issue on my platform.  Hez, are you working on this one?
>
> I thought that all the cairo drivers had this issue? I'd be really
> surprised if we could solve this one in a week though given how long it
> has been with us. My recollection is that problem goes away if we don't
> use dynamic drivers or if we don't render any text, suggesting some
> mixture of Pango, dynamics drivers and loading/unloading libltdl resources.

These points are all true, from what I have seen and remember.  If one
avoids text then there is no segmentation fault on any platform I have
tested.  Also, last I checked, this does not occur on Fedora.  It has
been a while since I have tested this particular issue there though.

I agree with Hazen that it is not currently worth delaying the release
for this.  It is a bad problem, but I don't think an extra week will
make much of a difference in this case.

Hez

-- 
Hezekiah M. Carty
Graduate Research Assistant
University of Maryland
Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science