Bad Timing

Ok this has to be bad karma or something.

I just finished packaging a portaudio snapshot because the stock Ubuntu-Version of portaudio is just too old.

So I upload them to the ubuntu bugtracker after careful testing on Kubuntu 32-bit and Kubuntu 64-bit. Everything works fine.

Yesterday I tested the whole setup (simon and the portaudio snapshot) on Ubuntu 32-bit and with it the Pulseaudio soundserver. simon crashes instantly when I deactivate it (which happens to happen all the time).

Back to square one. First I try to debug the problem but even when building every package I can find with debug information I get no valid backtraces at all. Valgrind doesn't help. Pasuspender? Crash. OSS devices? Crash. Nothing. The only thing that kind-of-works is using padsp and then using OSS devices in simon. But thats not good enough IMO.

So I start to look around and after quite some discouraging "there was some effort but now it is dead" posts on mailing lists and a lot of pushing the blame around (portaudio support in pulseaudio or pulseaudio support in portaudio?) I finally find light at the end of the tunnel. Apparently the problem annoyed enough audacity users that they integrated a patch into the audacity fork of portaudio that allows to use non-mmap devices which is apparently needed by pulseaudio.

David, It works!!!!!!!!!

Good enough for me. So I download the patch and a new portaudio snapshot and try to apply it. It fails. Of course.

So after going through it line by line and double checking the portaudio code I realize that the patch was already integrated. So why doesn't it work? Is the Audacity fork of portaudio just so much more advanced?

But then I look at the portaudio svn log and see this:

r1412 | aknudsen | 2009-05-24 18:54:22 +0200 (Son, 24. Mai 2009) | 2 Zeilen

Apply Kevin Kofler's non-mmap patch

Checking back to the date of the snapshot I used for packaging: 2009-05-19. I made the packages over the course of the last 3 days but used the "old" code, mind you.

So in an effort to update the stock version that is 2 years too old, I updated it with packages of a newer portaudio version that is ... 5 days too old. Oh the irony.

Ok I am off packaging portaudio again. And this time I am using the SVN version.