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Fedora

Happy (belated) New Year, canto users!

Bad news. In addition to being broken by a python-multiprocessing bug in Ubuntu Karmic, Fedora Core 12 broke canto. This time, it's actually a distro bug: the python included with FC12 has linked the python curses module against ncurses rather than ncursesw which basically breaks unicode output and (as has come up before) canto doesn't take too kindly to having no unicode support. Basically any python curses program is going to be Unicode-less on FC12.

The canto bug is here: Bug 541368

The actual offending bug is here: Bug 539917

Anybody trying to work around it... sorry. I was able to get canto to work by overwriting the installed Python with a a freshly compiled 2.6.4 but that's not really acceptable in the long run. If someone wants to put up an actual RPM with a fixed python, that'd be awesome. Otherwise, it's just waiting for someone to close the bug.

I had a Mandriva user in the IRC channel report a similar segfault as well. I wouldn't be surprised if the Python maintainer made a similar mistake (or if FC and Mandriva share RPM build specs). Confirmation pending though.

0.7.5

You can grab the 0.7.5 release from the download page.

Fix some reader inconsistencies with reader keys moving selections
Wrap some harmless, rare curses exceptions
Workaround messed up SIGCHLD handling in multiprocessing
Doc updates

This fixes the problems arising with the move to Karmic Koala for Ubuntu. I'm not sure what in particular caused it to break between Jaunty and now, whether it was the addition of 2.6.4 or just some obscure timing thing that happens to be prevalent or not.

There were a number of features queued up in the git tree, but I wasn't really planning on releasing this quick until the Karmic bugs started to crop up yesterday, so I tucked them into a branch and will re-merge them later.

As a side note, I'm not a fan of Ubuntu for this very reason. This bug isn't their fault (or mine, AFAICT thanks to the multiprocessing module - a module built around spawning new processes - being intolerant of custom SIGCHLD handlers), but because Ubuntu is now frozen for karmic, I won't be able to get 0.7.5 into the main repo until the next release... despite the fact that I only start to get bugs after the release is actually made. It would make more sense, to me at least, if they froze stuff that was part of their core distribution (GNOME, firefox, kernel etc.) but continued to track Debian testing for their unsupported 'universe' packages (which is where canto falls).

Anyway, have fun! Submit bugs!

GitHub

In the tradition of the last few weeks of avoiding source commits that actually mean anything =P, I've started to mirror the canto source at GitHub. This is mainly because I attempted to do the same thing with Google Code, but git->svn is a pain in the ass and the only reason I chose GC in the first place (well, aside from the fact that NRSS was Google Code and GitHub didn't even exist at the time) was that it had an issue tracker. Now that GitHub has that as well, I've been looking for the time to move it in there.

Obviously, I will continue to host my own git / site / etc. so nothing on the user end should change unless you're looking to fork the project or a submit a bug directly into the tracker.

The handful of open bugs in the Google Code tracker have been moved over by hand. All but one of them are merely wishlist.

As time permits, I might try to convert the site markdown to display correctly on GitHub as you browse, but since this site uses some extra extensions to python-markdown 2.0, I doubt it will work with a single source.

Have fun! Submit bugs (to the new tracker)!

Three weeks

Wow, so three weeks since I've touched git and the world of Canto hasn't imploded. Hooray. Last month shattered some records with respect to site traffic / downloads / bandwidth / popcon installs and votes / AUR votes (basically across the board), but bug reports are still sparing. In fact yesterday was the first actual bug that required a commit to fix.

You can see a write up w/ workaround (for those that use the n/p keybinds in the reader and don't want to wait for release) here.

Bug in long-running instances

One report notes that for Canto instances that have been running for a long while (a couple of days, in a screen session), the client stops updated and starts dominating the CPU.

I've managed to track this down to a call to the multiprocessing module that decides to choke to death deep in the C code because the length of something it's attempting to write is > INT_MAX which seems... highly unlikely... I don't think the cPickle output of a feed is going to reach into the gigabytes of size....

Regardless, I'm still attempting to fix it, even if it turns out that I have to submit patches to Python itself.

Debian Maintainership

Some bad news. The long-time Canto maintainer, Daniel Baumann had to drop the package as one of his main packages, along with a number of others (like ncurses itself). Currently, Canto's maintainer is listed as Debian Q-A. If anyone would like to take over, the position is open =).

Thanks to Daniel for being such a great maintainer.

Have fun! Submit bugs!

Distro update + User input

Just some quick notes. First of all, thanks to mruwek for getting a new 0.7.4 ebuild into the Gentoo sunrise overlay. I don't know if he's going to follow it, but he put in the initial effort and has the ability to. Regardless, thanks for being so prompt and helping me out (it's been awaiting moderation for a couple of days, but it's now in the overlay proper).

Also good news is that 0.7.2 was synced into Ubuntu Karmic and while I would've been happier with 0.7.4 (the Debian package hasn't even updated though, so I understand), the important point is that 0.7.2 is 100% compatible with 0.7.4 so that after Karmic becomes the default install, Ubuntu users won't have to be constantly shepherded through an upgrade process. The reason I bring it up is that Jaunty is still running 0.5.7 which is not only configuration incompatible, but also disk incompatible with >0.6.x and it sucks, but at the same time I won't continue to support legacy changes (yes, my friends, there is a reason that the first number in the version is a zero) because one distro is frozen a year in the past.

Lastly, I'd like to encourage anybody with suggestions for future ideas to submit a bug (or use any other form of contact) to go ahead and suggest it. I consider Canto to be fairly featureful, but ideas for improvements are always welcome.

Have fun! Submit bugs!