Smart Roadmap

[Anders F Björklund]

Gustavo Niemeyer wrote:

>> Smart 1.3.x
>> https://launchpad.net/smart/+milestone/1.3.1
>>
>> Everything but the fixes for pycurl has now been committed,
>> making for a prerelease version of 1.3.1 available in bzr.
>> Once the curl is in, it will be tagged ("1.3.1") as well...
>> But please use bzr (branch lp:smart) for delivery meanwhile.
>
> I haven't followed up since our last conversation on the curl-backed
> fetcher, but again, please be careful there.  It took a while to get
> it to a point where it wouldn't freeze due to bad interaction between
> the threads and multi-curl, so naively removing the safeguards will
> likely yield into bad results which again will be hard to fix.

This is why (almost) none of the curl fixes has been merged yet.
We don't have enough tests in place yet for pycurl, especially
not when running in a multithreaded environment or for the
larger download sets that seem to have the most problems...

Currently we're just evaluating a change from sleep(0.2) to
select(1.0), to avoid the previous maximum speed of 70K/s (!)
That is: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/244466 (trunk r947)
and some bug fixes with respect to various error handling...


It would be nice to get the enable/disable feature in though,
so that one could just disable curl in case of such problems.

i.e. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/522518

Another nice feature would be to avoid having to "kill -9"
smart when it's busy doing a download and CTRL+C is broken ?

i.e. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/533777

But not to the point of risk introducing segfaults or deadlocks.
(seems strange to me that "import pycurl" would crash, but anyway)

Getting some nice feedback from Unity Linux about all of these...
David Smid has been sending in lots of patches for consideration.

--anders