The 3.6.0 release was painful

Paul released 3.6.0 on last Friday, with a bit of pain which could have been avoided by two things: checked translations with msgfmt -c (which translators seem to often forget), and a better Sourceforge.net interface (which is a long-standing problem).

Then I’ve started to package it and then, the problems started:

Me after the 3.6.0 release

  • It crashed hard on Maemo – due to the new menu code. Fixed.
  • I forgot to include the new Enchant dependancy in Ubuntu packages, breaking the spellchecker. Rebuilt, fixed. Fixed?
  • The MIME parts icons were invisible on Maemo, for strange Gtk widget requisitions problems. It had always worked everywhere… Fixed, anyway.
  • Multiple, strange crashes happened to Ubuntu users in extra plugins – due to my rebuild of the core with spellchecker support, which changed structures sizes, and I didn’t rebuild extra plugins, making plugins look in the wrong place for preferences, for example. Fixed.
  • Crashes in vCalendar, due to a « leak fix » I did which in reality introduced a double-free. Fixed. (The first one to say that gotos are evil gets my foot to the bottom – gotos aren’t evil. Programmer’s stupidity is).
  • SSL handshakes failures with some IMAP servers using my Ubuntu packages. A bug I introduced in libetpan when built against GnuTLS. Fixed in libetpan, and fixed in Claws.

It now seems to be under control, but most of these problems are in the source of libetpan 0.56, Claws Mail 3.6.0 and vCalendar 2.0.1, which means that if my packages work, packages made by other people, not aware of these issues, contain this issue. So, we plan to release a 3.6.1 at the end of the week if Paul can, and Hoa plans to release libetpan 0.57, so that our lives and users’ lives are easier during the next development cycle.

And all of these problems are my own fault, which makes it very frustrating. I hate releasing crap, and all of these, apart the invisible-icon-on-Maemo bug, could have been avoided if I double-checked stuff a bit better at the time I did it.

Oh, and Mandriva packages have not been done, because their SVN is frozen for the 2009.0 release. I had been annoyed by that at first, but in the end, maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t push that into their release!