Developers of Sympa

[David Verdin <address@concealed>]

Hi all,

Le 25/01/11 17:15, IKEDA Soji a écrit :

On Wed, 26 Jan 2011 00:58:37 +0900
IKEDA Soji <address@concealed> wrote:

In current Sympa codes, Text::LineBreak is used to format system
messages and plain digest messages.  It means that --- orphaned
memory blocks will be accumulated time by time so that non-stopping 
operation will be impossible sooner or later on some busy sites.

Gosh, it was Text::LineFold.  I seem a bit flustrated (^_^;).

Again, thanks to persistent development work by Sympa team!

And thanks for keeping your modules up to date and being so quick to fix bugs when they are reported.

<following is quote only>

Thanks to continuous integration manner by Sympa developers, my
correction may spread as soon as expected.

On Tue, 25 Jan 2011 15:46:55 +0100
Guillaume Rousse <address@concealed> wrote:

Le 25/01/2011 15:15, Stefan Hornburg (Racke) a écrit :

On 01/25/2011 03:08 PM, Guillaume Rousse wrote:

Le 25/01/2011 14:34, Stefan Hornburg (Racke) a écrit :

I agree with the minimal version needed approach. However, in this case
the Perl module in question is apparently buggy (memory leak). If the
end user really wants this, he can still edit the prerequisites,
can't he?

Can you ensure all other perl modules sympa is currently depending on
are exempt of similar bugs, and would not require similar change ?

Of course not, but preventing Sympa from using modules with severe known
bugs
is a good thing IMHO.

"severe" for  a memory leak is highly subjective, and depend on your
context. A security issue would be less discussable, for instance.

Yes, but we experimented such a memory leak two weeks ago and were desperately trying to fix it. Sympa rose from a few hundreds MB to 3 GB memory use in a few minutes.
Not a server crash, and no security issue involved. But it clearly slowed down the server until we restarted Sympa.
So anything that can prevent such memory leaks is fine by my book. That's the reason why I would rather increase the pre-requisites in Sympa.

We TRY to use the smallest version of each CPAN module providing the features we need. That increases the chances to find it packaged for a given distribution, as CPAN installation can be harsh sometimes.

But we probably need to have a look at the versions we recommand to check problems such as those reported by Soji.

So shortly: if I, as a developper, know that my software will be improved by upgrading a dependency, I tend to encourage people to upgrade said dependency. And making it upgrade at install time is sure a good way to do it. But I won't force to install a newer version of a module for new features we don't use.

I concur with Stefan's remark about people not always reading the install notes. Not everybody has the time to do it.

Regards,

David

I'd rather have a note in sympa installation instructions than only
minimal versions are specified, and latest version should be prefered in
all cases, because they usually fix some kind of bugs.

Better make a note how to change the minimal versions :-). People hardly
read
this kind of notes :-/.

That's their problem, not yours. I don't know what 'people' do, I only
know what I do. And I hate having software developers taking such
decisions behind my back 'just for my own safety'.
-- 
BOFH excuse #231:

We had to turn off that service to comply with the CDA Bill.

-- 

--
David Verdin
Comité réseau des universités

Due to the limitations of human brain, I fail to remember all the mails.
So if you want your bug reports or feature requests for Sympa to be processed, please post them to the Sympa tracker