(no subject)

[ewx]

December: I find a bug in ImageMagick, and send them a patch which seems to fix it for me.

Nothing happens for three months.

April: I send it to them again. They reply saying they saw the patch and that it was wrong, which is fair enough as far as technical content goes; but if they'd replied in an even vaguely timely manner I might have still had enough state in my head to try to fix it.

Right now I just think they're unhelpful idiots.

Comments

[senji.livejournal.com]

It's becomming increasingly true that I find helpful author/maintainers good, rather than unhelpful ones bad, :-(

[hsenag.livejournal.com]

They ignored a question/bugreport from me several months ago too. I wasn't entirely sure how to fix it but did ask for hints.

I've found that if it's writing out a JPG file and there's some error (e.g. disk full), it just quits, leaving a corrupted file on disk. This is because this is libjpeg's default behaviour, but it offers an option to override this which ImageMagick ignores. It's really annoying when you want a CGI script to be fast and thus just rely on the existence of the file as evidence that it's correct.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Ah. Glad it's not just me, then...

just quits

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Do you mean, "calls exit"? If so with what status?

Re: just quits

[hsenag.livejournal.com]

Yes, I do mean "calls exit", and I can't remember the status without digging in the code. If you're interested I'll have a look at the details when I have some time; I could do with remembering them myself anyway. I made a most to magick-developers in July 2002 about it.

Re: just quits

[ewx.livejournal.com]

'cos if it's a nonzero status then it's your own damn fault for not checking the exit status, see.

Re: just quits

[hsenag.livejournal.com]

Calling exit at all isn't a very reasonable thing for a *library* to do; it should signal an error back to the calling application. In this case I can't check the exit status, since the code that would do it has just been terminated by the call to exit.

(I could probably in principle install an atexit handler, but this would be messy to do from perl, and it would still be pretty hard for the perl interpreter to continue.)

Re: just quits

[hsenag.livejournal.com]

[Reading what I said originally, I realise it wasn't very clear I was talking about using ImageMagick as a library, rather than as a command-line utility]

Re: just quits

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, I take it back, if it was the library that exited!