[Ardour-Users] Struggling to do anything at all

[John Emmas]

Sorry to jump on the bandwagon here - but I must admit, I've also been
disappointed by Ardour's  many stability issues (and I don't even use Ardour
for 'real' work - I only use it in testing).

I didn't mention anything before because nobody else was complaining about
stability so I assumed it was just my particular installation.  But it's
becoming clear that lots of people are having stability problems and they've
probably all been keeping for the same reason.....  just like me - they
thought it was only happening to them!

And at the risk of annoying everyone with my pet 'hobby horse' again, this
kind of thing is very symptomatic of a poor debugging regime.  When I first
joined the Ardour project I was amazed at how many developers were writing
features without (apparently) any ability (or even any desire) to
single-step through their code.  It's the difficulty / inability to do
single-step debugging that's still the #1 reason why I'm reluctant to devote
more time to Ardour development.  Log files and back-traces are all very
well in theory - but I've sent a couple of back traces to various people and
no-one yet has managed to find the corresponding bug(s).  I probably spend
around 30 percent of my time single stepping and I honestly don't understand
how anyone can develop without it.  No matter how experienced you are as a
programmer, single stepping "always" shows up things you didn't anticipate.

That's my tuppence worth anyway.....

Cheers,

John


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Steven Chamberlain" <steven at pyro.eu.org>
To: <ardour-users at lists.ardour.org>
Sent: 02 August 2007 13:17
Subject: [Ardour-Users] Struggling to do anything at all


> Don't get me wrong, I really appreciate the work that has happened so
> far on Ardour, but I don't understand how anyone can use it do any real
> work.  And with new features being added all the time, it seems even
> basic editing can cause crashes and loss of data now.
>
> Issue 1:
>  1. Create new session
>  2. Capture a few regions
>  3. Drag them around and adjust the start/end position (cropping)
>  4. Hit 'undo' key a few times
> Ardour crashes with 'pure virtual function called', or 'terminate called
> without active exception' (or similar).
>
> Issue 2:
>  1. Record a number of overlapping regions by looping over a punch range
> Upon clicking stop, Ardour may consume all available memory and bring
> the system to a halt, or audio data may disappear from some of the
> tracks.  Otherwise:
>  2. Adjust the start position a few times, for some or all regions to
> set up crossfades
> Ardour crashes (not sure of the error message).
>
> Issue 3:
>  1. After a crash, try to load your work and hope it's still intact.
> Several pages of these error messages, each id repeated 3 times:
>  ardour: [ERROR]: Session: XMLNode describing a AudioRegion references
> an unknown source id =57703
>  ardour: [ERROR]: Session: cannot create Region from XML description.
>  ardour: [ERROR]: Session: XMLNode describing a AudioRegion references
> an unknown source id =58173
>  ardour: [FATAL]: programming error: unknown region type passed to
> Session::add_region()
>
> Isn't this the issue discussed in "Stability and Session Errors
> [FIXED]"?  If so I am using SVN 2219 from 2.0-ongoing, which includes
> the patch from Sampo which I think was supposed to fix that.
>
> Regards,
> -- 
> Steven Chamberlain
> steven at pyro.eu.org
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