Request for delaying stable release: Multi-currency code still not mature enough

[Derek Atkins]

Nigel Titley <nigel@titley.com> writes:

> > No, it did not become "less stable". I _thought_ it was pretty stable, _too_. 
> > But when I now tried my real data, I discovered that it is _not_ pretty 
> > stable, at least not compared to gnucash-1.6. The point simply is that I 
> > haven't been using it for actual daily work before, and when I did this now, 
> > I discovered far more still unstable points than I thought there were. 

Fair enough.  Having been offline for the last two weeks I haven't
been around to hear these issues on #gnucash, and any filed bugs have
not been assigned to me.  So I haven't seen what may have broke (or be
unstable).

> > I'll continue working with this now, and I'll file bugzillla bugs every time I 
> > discover reproducible errors. However, I've already stumbled over a bunch of 
> > errors without being able to reproduce them. And this led me to my previous 
> > message. :-\

Non-reproducible errors are annoying.  Sometimes it may be useful to
at least document these (in email if not in bugzilla) so others can
at least know what to look for.  Sometimes saying "I saw this behavior"
might be sufficient to jog someone else's "I think I know what you mean"
reactions.  I know it's happened to me before ;)

> I would agree with Christian, for what my opinion is worth. I *am* using
> it for day to day real data, including multi-currency, and I have at
> least three bugs open with bugzilla each of which is pretty much of a
> show-stopper for me, two of them cause crashes, and one freezes Gnucash
> solid.

I know at least one of these is a SX bug.  What are the other two?
Besides, aren't you using some home-grown Linux-based machine that
you built yourself?  Can you supply gdb traces and other debugging
tools (or perhaps give a developer an account on your system) in
order to aid debugging?

>  Now Josh is (hopefully) on top of one of these, but the other two
> haven't even been succesfully reproduced by anyone but me (although I
> can reproduce them without problem). Sure as fate, if you make a full
> release, once more people are hammering on the code, you will find these
> bugs are reproducible. I really don't think it is sufficiently stable to
> release at the moment.

I admit that crashing is clearly a Bad Thing...  However not being
able to reproduce a problem makes it very hard to bug-track.  Considering
you can reproduce it, perhaps you could add a bunch of printf()'s in
the code and help determine where it is dying, when, and how?

> Nigel

-derek
-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
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