Wubble

Caleb, I’m sure you’re less than enthused about seeing that bug now mentioned a third time by me, but what can you expect?

First off, I have no nothing but praise for how quickly it was handled; the bug was fixed and a release made within 24 hours. And for distributions like Ubuntu which track upstream releases, we know that users will almost instantly see the fix. But when the bug manages to sneak its way into a distro that has a policy of not pushing out upstream updates, then users of that distro will suffer indefinitely unless and until an updated package is specially made by the distro publisher – and that’s what happened with SuSE 10 – the only distro unlucky enough to cut a release with the bug. So, until the updated package was released yesterday, the bug continued to be very real for SuSE 10 users and as you’d expect, they were very quick to blame us when the crash happened. Would you rather I not have told Joe what the problem was and how to fix it? As I said at the beginning of that post, I’d rather just have written a comment to his blog entry but that option wasn’t available. Heck, I’d rather that this be a comment to your blog entry, but that’s also not an option.

I also don’t understand what you mean by saying that an “in” was mispelled as “id”. The bug in question was that the library was attempting to parse the “id” attribute of filter elements but was accidentally reading out of the xml into one variable and then attempting to manipulate a second, otherwise unused, variable that had been initialised to NULL as if it was the id, which was causing it to fail an ASSERT that the id was not NULL. I fail to see how changing the svg file so that the “id” attribute was an “in” attribute would have helped. Ignoring the apparent requirement that all elements have ids, we’d obviously just hit the same ASSERT or worse if the attribute was missing. The only work around I could conceive of would be to alter the svg to not use filter elements at all, and I considered that excessive.

I don’t like the idea of harping on about this bug because I know you guys responded to it immediately and that you’ve been doing a lot of cool things since then, but it only became old news for SuSE 10 users yesterday. Like you, I’m very much hoping to never have need to talk about it again.