Re: [Denemo-devel] Help Needed

[Richard Shann]

On Thu, 2013-11-28 at 08:12 -0600, Josue Abarca wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 28, 2013 at 10:03:50AM +0000, Richard Shann wrote:
> > There appears to be a bug in one of the libraries that Debian Stable

I perhaps should have explained that I am fairly sure the bug is with
the tool-chain used to create the libsmf library rather than the libsmf
source code (e.g a compiler optimizer bug). 

[...]
> 
> About libsmf, are there currently differences in the "embedded libsmf
> in Denemo" with the upstream libsmf ?.

It looks like some minor things have been done on our version of libsmf,
I haven't been involved in that myself.

> 
> Maybe you can share the changes with the original developer of libsmf?
> 
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/libsmf/ (it seems he has been inactive
> for some time).
> 
> I will try what you are asking for, and also will try to see the
> differences with libsmf, but if you find the differences and it this
> is caused by a bug in libsmf, please let me know, we can patch the
> debian package to fix the problem.

Well, now I think about it, I suppose the Debian source code for libsmf
could be newer than the stuff embedded in Denemo - I'm afraid I'm not
sufficiently agile with locating the source code corresponding to my
installation. However, looking at the latest source code I see that the
function that is yielding a nonsense result has exactly the same source
lines, but if I call it (from the debugger) it gives different results.
(I'm having trouble explaining this clearly: I stop Denemo and
alternately call the function that is in the Debian libsmf library and
the one I have compiled from the same* source lines, and the result is
different. They should have compiled down to something that did the same
thing given the environment in which they are called).

* subject to there being no different version of this function, which
seems highly likely, it is quite simple and hasn't changed in any
version I have seen. (It is so simple it can be lifted bodily out and
re-compiled elsewhere having no internal, private, dependencies).

> 
> So, if you send a mail to the original developer of libsmf, please CC
> me.
> 
> Thanks for all your work in denemo.
> 
> 
> (Sorry for the long delay on my work, currently I am working to update
> the denemo version in debian unstable and to create a backport for
> stable).
> 

Will do - thank you!

Richard