Hi guys, It looks like a developer on the PortAudio mailing list has made a little bit of progress in troubleshooting our dreaded PortAudio xrun deadlock and thread termination problem: http://music.columbia.edu/pipermail/portaudio/2010-May/010234.html
(For some info on this bug, see: https://bugs.launchpad.net/mixxx/+bug/383431 ) As far as we know, this bug affects _every_ user on Ubuntu, and as a result, on our downloads page we recommend that Ubuntu users install an older version of PortAudio. Unfortunately, the users that get Mixxx from Synaptic or the Ubuntu Software Centre won't know that, and get Mixxx with a deadlock-prone version of PortAudio. None of us have ever dug into PortAudio's ALSA code seriously enough to figure out why the problem happens, probably because we've got enough bugs directly inside Mixxx to keep us busy. However, this bug is definitely causing problems for a huge number of people, and is probably severely affecting the growth of our userbase. We estimate roughly 50% of our users run Linux, and since most of those people are running Ubuntu, many people's first impressions of Mixxx are likely ruined by this bug. Because we get most of our developers from the Linux community, this bug needs to be fixed if we want to keep growing. None of the PortAudio maintainers have fixed this bug so far, and none of them are expressing any interest in doing it. Thus, we're faced with the following decision: Pull our own developer time away from Mixxx and try to convince one or more of us to fix the bug in PortAudio, or find a way of getting someone else to fix it. I work on Mixxx because it's super fun, but my enthusiasm for fixing PortAudio is very low, even though it's important to us. I think our entire team feels the same way, otherwise someone would have fixed the bug by now. However, I think this is a great opportunity to put our pool of funds that we've received from donations to good use. I'd like us to propose a $100 bounty on fixing this bug. It's not a huge amount of money, but I think it would provide a little bit of incentive for the guy on the PortAudio mailing list who's already started poking at the problem to fix it for good. The way I see it is that we have a very important bug we want fixed, but we lack the resources to do it ourselves. Over the years, we've received approximately $600 in donations from users who want to "support and enhance Mixxx development", and I think placing a $100 bounty on this bug would be an excellent way to do exactly that. If anyone would like to share their thoughts or opinions on this, I'm all ears. The bounty would be contingent on a fix for virtual and pure ALSA devices being committed to the PortAudio SVN repository and testing from us that ensures the problem is actually fixed. Thank you, Albert ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Mixxx-devel mailing list Mixxx-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mixxx-devel
