'welcome1stboot' fixed

A few days ago ...14th?... I had Wary and Racy at what I thought was release quality. Then I found that 'welcome1stboot' would not start after I had upgraded GTK from 2.24.5 to 2.24.8.

(On the other-hand, other testers reported that welcome1stboot did work.)

So, I played with rolling GTK back to 2.20.1.

But, just now I have discovered why welcome1stboot does not work. I am both relieved and very exasperated.

'welcome1stboot' is written in BaCon. Now, BaCon does not link the GTK libraries as shared libraries in the normal manner. Instead, BaCon has it's own code to load the libraries. This is where the problem occurs -- and it sure is awful, I consider it to be a serious bug in BaCon.

Wary/Racy has these in /usr/lib, where the first is a symlink:
libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0 libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0.2400.5

When the 'devx' is loaded, there is also the symlink:
libgtk-x11-2.0.so

Now this is the awful part: at runtime, the Bacon app tries to load 'libgtk-x11-2.0.so'. It cannot, so crashes. There is no error message identifying the cause of the crash.

It is standard, engraved in stone, practice that *.so files are used during compiling, not at runtime. The BaCon application should really be using libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0.

God, I have spent days working on this problem, on the verge of "developer fatigue". Oh well. I will put the *.so symlinks into the gtk PET, and hopefully should be able to put up another Release Candidate of Wary/Racy.

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Comments

Grief
Username: Sage
Well done! How lonely is it to be the only guy on the planet that can understand [b]AND[/b] fix these sorts of problems!

Permanent Beta
Username: tronkel
"Why not take a leaf out of Google's book and leave the Wary/Racy series where they are in permanent Beta for the moment at least. Racy 5.1.110 for example is extremely usable and is probably better on my hardware than a lot of previous "final" versions. It's more than good enough as it is. This would have two benefits: A. Barry is getting jaded with this series. A long break from this will do more to produce a good final that fighting the thing out to the bitter end at the moment. B. There is no time to lose on this ARM version idea. The PC field is changing before our very eyes. Before we know it, the sector will have moved on and the current sorts of PC-based Linux systems (and Windows too) will be history anyway. The future belongs to those who get their oar in early. It's a case of getting the priorities sorted

Tags: wary