To get the ball rolling on the promised Monday discussion of the current release status, and what that implies for the release date, here is what I have been up to this weekend.
I decided to comprehensively test PLplot on Linux using the epa_build procedure (documented in cmake/epa_build/README) for doing that. That procedure ran into memory management issues for Qt5 that happen (according to valgrind) whenever an attempt is made to exit Plplot or (curiously) whenever an attempt is made to exit the cursor-mode OK button for qt_example. These memory management issues do not occur at all for Qt4 (which likely explains Andrew's reported success with preliminary testing of PLplot for this release). But for Qt5, these issues resulted in at least one segfault which motivated the valgrind investigation that showed these specific memory management issues. I don't think we have changed our exit procedures since the last time I tested Qt-5.3.1 this way so I suspect the memory management issues were always there, but they only generated a segfault by luck just this time. I then shifted from epa_building Qt 5.3.1 to 5.4.1, but that version of Qt5 would not even compile! I then shifted to trying 5.3.2, and that built without issues, but gave the same memory managment valgrind-reported errors for the same specific PLplot situations plus the segfault. At this stage I don't know whether the issue is in Qt5.3.x or my epa_build of that software or something else, but what I intend to do about this for the rest of this release cycle is simply to avoid (with a WARNING) all qt testing in my "comprehensive" tests when Qt5 is being used to allow me to complete such comprehensive testing. So tomorrow (Monday my time) I will implement that constraint on no comprehensive testing of Qt5, and then try the comprehensive test on Linux of an epa_built PLplot version again. At this stage it is already clear that at mimimum it is going to be next weekend (March 7th) for the release date because of everything I have to do to finish comprehensive testing and a number of other pre-release steps. Of course, that ETA is still quite uncertain and could be even a wekk later. But I will do another summary of the situation late tomorrow (Monday) with results depending on whether I can get all the way through a comprehensive test on Linux tomorrow, and also depending on reports from Phil and Jim about how their plwidgets/plbuf and plmeta/plbuf debugging efforts are proceeding. Alan __________________________ Alan W. Irwin Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca). Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net). __________________________ Linux-powered Science __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dive into the World of Parallel Programming The Go Parallel Website, sponsored by Intel and developed in partnership with Slashdot Media, is your hub for all things parallel software development, from weekly thought leadership blogs to news, videos, case studies, tutorials and more. Take a look and join the conversation now. http://goparallel.sourceforge.net/ _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
