Re: GOP-PROP 8: issue priorities (probable decision)

[Graham Percival]

On Sat, Aug 13, 2011 at 07:12:53AM +0200, David Kastrup wrote:
> Keith OHara <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > Issue 1809 is an interesting test of this policy.  `make test`
> > sometimes crashes for some programmers, making it very hard for them
> > to contribute, but it crashes in the Guile garbage collection, so we
> > might be powerless to resolve the issue.
> 
> It crashes because the internal garbage collector data structures have
> been clobbered.  Which is likely due to some Lilypond code problem (like
> data available too early for collection).  So it is likely that we are
> not "powerless to resolve the issue", but since the crash is happening
> at a point rather remote from the likely bug and is quite sensitive to
> the memory layout of the code, it is really hard to track down.

If it's at all relevant, we haven't heard any complaints about
thsi before a month or two ago.  Without a reliable test, this
doesn't really help in narrowing down the scope of the problem --
but I do believe that it's due to (or at least, exacerbated by) a
relatively recent lilypond code change.

I think we can avoid the horns of the dilemma, though:
- if it crashes regularly, (safe) contribution is impossible.  But
  then we have a reliable (or at least reliable-ish) test case.
- if it crashes very infrequently, (safe) contribution is a pain,
  but not impossible.

Given the frequency I've heard about, I'd rank this as
type-Maintainability, rather than type-Critical.  With a note that
if anybody can reproduce it with a command-line more than 30% of
the time, we'll bump it up to type-Critical.

Cheers,
- Graham