Bug#231862: closed by John Ferlito jo...@inodes.org (libvorbis0a: oggenc still dies sometimes with floating point exception)
Hello John, On Mon, Apr 05, 2010 at 11:48:18AM +1000, John Ferlito wrote: On Sun, Apr 04, 2010 at 04:42:07PM +0200, Helge Kreutzmann wrote: Hello John, On Sat, Apr 03, 2010 at 03:33:08AM +, Debian Bug Tracking System wrote: This bug is ancient and is most likely fixed. Feel free to re-open if you don't think that is the case. What kind of bug maintenance is this snip I find it unfortunate that you find the need to simply jump to conclusions and send such an incendiary email in a public forum, rather than perhaps send me a quick private email to find out why I went down this path. Sorry, I was probably a bit quick in my reply. But please realise that I tried to supply a good bug report (find a reproducible test case, supply a back trace, keep the sample for further debugging) and then heard nothing (!) in this bug, not even a simple ack, I'll look at it later. I have only recently taken over maintenance of these packages in an effort to try and clean up the mess that has been accumulating for many years. With a goal to try and keep them maintained much better, seeing as I do have some time to devote to this whereas past maintainers may not have. Ok, then please accept my apologies. I was not aware of this and your previous e-mail did not indicate that you are the new maintainer of this package. It's great that you take care of this package and its bugs. libvorbis, vorbis-tools and libao have not been maintained in an extremely long time. I have spent the past two days of my Easter creating new packages since upstream have finally after many years released new versions. Great! Hope they make it for Squeeze. This required me to go through approx 60 bugs, most of them dating back to 2004 and 2005 which are simply not relevant to the current code base. This probably is not a nice task. I remember that I once took over a package and tried to hunt down reported bugs but the submitters had no longer the hardware to reproduce. So the only course of action I had was to tag them moreinfo. Not nice if you try to go down to zero bugs (to get the best for users). In your case probably worse, because of the number of bugs (and to get an overview of active bugs and passive ones). For most bugs including this one I took the time to have a quick look at the source code and change logs to try and ascertain whether or not the bug was likely fixed. This involved me taking one of a couple of steps Good to hear, I wasn't aware of this. a) Pushing the bug upstream where I confirmed it was still an issue b) Closing bugs that were unreproducible and no response had been heard from the original submitter when queried c) Closing bugs where it seemed unlikely there was a problem any longer asking for them to be reopened if it was believed the problem still existed I can perfectly understand your proceeding here, but I don't know if this is the right course of action. You could tag it moreinfo and at least send a query (and then push it to the b) category). I personally don't know what the proper course of action with case b) actually is. (And I don't have time atm to look at policy). Personally I would be reluctant to close bugs which I don't know if they are really closed. d) probably some others I can't remember right now For this bug and many others, (Keep in mind this bug was originally filed back in 2004, that's 6 years ago now), after a quick look at the code and considering the amount of time I came to the conclusion that it was extremely unlikely that the bug still existed and chose option c). Probably right, given my reasoning in the last e-mail, but maybe a quick query would have been nice, e.g. sending a note to all packages in category c) stating that you believed they were fixed and if they could try to confirm this with your latest package. And if no response come in in a reasonable time frame, you could move them to b). Thank you very much for taking the time to indeed confirm that this bug is most likely no longer relevant. When I report bugs I try to follow through as much as possible, because my intend is to get the issue solved. So I perfectly understand your reasoning, but for next time (maybe another lonely package :-)) the path could be improve as well. And sorry if I reacted to strongly, and good luck and (hopefully) fun in maintaining the vorbis family! Greetings Helge -- Dr. Helge Kreutzmann deb...@helgefjell.de Dipl.-Phys. http://www.helgefjell.de/debian.php 64bit GNU powered gpg signed mail preferred Help keep free software libre: http://www.ffii.de/ signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Bug#231862: closed by John Ferlito jo...@inodes.org (libvorbis0a: oggenc still dies sometimes with floating point exception)
Hello John, On Sat, Apr 03, 2010 at 03:33:08AM +, Debian Bug Tracking System wrote: This bug is ancient and is most likely fixed. Feel free to re-open if you don't think that is the case. What kind of bug maintenance is this The bug was reported with a backtrace and an offer to provide the file, and yet not a *single* reply was made to this bug, all the years. Then you come along and state that it is ancient and most likely fixed. First, you could have analyzed the backtrace and handed it to upstream to get it fixed (like the previous one, cited in this bug report). If further debugging was needed, you could have asked for the file and used it for debugging. By the way, there are porter machines for Debian developers, where they can debug software. Of course, you could also have worked with me, the reporter, to obtain further information, try patches etc. And finally, if you simply hoped that a commit fixed the bug (e.g. because you couldn't spot it and upstream was unwilling to help) then you could have *asked* in the bug to try the latest version and see if this bug was closed. Waiting like 7 years and then replying that the bug is ancient and most likely fixed is probably the worst course of action I could expected, even if you have no time (possibility) to debug this issue (which would be sad for a DD). It really smells like hope the guy is no longer around and see that my bug count is getting down, because many bugs let my software (me?) look bad. I hope this all was just a bad day and a gross misunderstanding on my side. For the content of the bug. I took the file, transferred it to an alpha (not the original machine, which is dead by now, but some later model) and tried encoding it again (unfortunately I did not note down the exact command line options I used, so I encoded it twice with different bit rates). In both cases, it worked. So I might have been lucky, but I rather assume (given the error) that the general switch to IEEE arithmetic on alpha in gcc several years ago fixed the problem. So in essence, closing the bug was right but the way was *way wrong*. Helge -- Dr. Helge Kreutzmann deb...@helgefjell.de Dipl.-Phys. http://www.helgefjell.de/debian.php 64bit GNU powered gpg signed mail preferred Help keep free software libre: http://www.ffii.de/ signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Bug#231862: closed by John Ferlito jo...@inodes.org (libvorbis0a: oggenc still dies sometimes with floating point exception)
Hi Helge, On Sun, Apr 04, 2010 at 04:42:07PM +0200, Helge Kreutzmann wrote: Hello John, On Sat, Apr 03, 2010 at 03:33:08AM +, Debian Bug Tracking System wrote: This bug is ancient and is most likely fixed. Feel free to re-open if you don't think that is the case. What kind of bug maintenance is this snip I find it unfortunate that you find the need to simply jump to conclusions and send such an incendiary email in a public forum, rather than perhaps send me a quick private email to find out why I went down this path. I have only recently taken over maintenance of these packages in an effort to try and clean up the mess that has been accumulating for many years. With a goal to try and keep them maintained much better, seeing as I do have some time to devote to this whereas past maintainers may not have. libvorbis, vorbis-tools and libao have not been maintained in an extremely long time. I have spent the past two days of my Easter creating new packages since upstream have finally after many years released new versions. This required me to go through approx 60 bugs, most of them dating back to 2004 and 2005 which are simply not relevant to the current code base. For most bugs including this one I took the time to have a quick look at the source code and change logs to try and ascertain whether or not the bug was likely fixed. This involved me taking one of a couple of steps a) Pushing the bug upstream where I confirmed it was still an issue b) Closing bugs that were unreproducible and no response had been heard from the original submitter when queried c) Closing bugs where it seemed unlikely there was a problem any longer asking for them to be reopened if it was believed the problem still existed d) probably some others I can't remember right now For this bug and many others, (Keep in mind this bug was originally filed back in 2004, that's 6 years ago now), after a quick look at the code and considering the amount of time I came to the conclusion that it was extremely unlikely that the bug still existed and chose option c). Thank you very much for taking the time to indeed confirm that this bug is most likely no longer relevant. Cheers, John -- John Blog http://www.inodes.org LCA2010 http://www.lca2010.org.nz -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
