How not to release software

September 7th, 2009 - Severin

I generally tend to be nervous when releasing a new major version of LottaNZB and I always ask myself if we really catched all nasty bugs or if I’m going to wake up with my inbox full of bug reports. This time, I was pretty confident that everything went reasonably well, considering that I hadn’t added any new features for several months and only focused on making the software to run as smoothly as possible. We even had a public beta test this time, which helped to track down a few bugs I weren’t aware of before.

I should’ve known better. Soon after the release, Marcel de Vries reported that he was unable to launch LottaNZB 0.5 on a fresh installation of Ubuntu 9.04 due to missing directories. A fix was quickly developed and scheduled to be included in LottaNZB 0.5.1. Things got serious when dasbooter reported that it wasn’t possible to launch LottaNZB 0.5 on a machine with GTK 2.12 (may be Ubuntu 8.04).

I confirmed this issue after having set up a virtual machine running Ubuntu 8.04. The problem is that the migration from the deprecated libglade to GTKBuilder didn’t went as smoothly as I expected. While Ubuntu 8.04 comes with support for GTKBuilder (GTK 2.12), the support isn’t as complete as I expected it to be. For GTK 2.14 the problem is the same.

The release announcement has been changed quickly as well as the download page so that people running older distributions don’t end up with an installation of LottaNZB that simply won’t start. People how experience this problem are asked to remove LottaNZB 0.5 and go back to 0.4.1. They’ll probably need to reconfigure LottaNZB.

Where do we go from here? It’s clear that the lion’s share of all LottaNZB user tend to use the latest version of their distribution. Since it’s not even been a year since the release of GTK 2.14 (Ubuntu 8.10) and the fact that Ubuntu 8.04 is an LTS version, it’s clear that it would be desirable to have support for those versions. If it’s possible to get back the support for LottaNZB 0.5 for those versions using a reasonable amount of work, it should be done. LottaNZB 0.6 on the other hand will definitely depend on GTK 2.16.

I’m afraid I can’t give you a date when and if the LottaNZB 0.5.x series will support GTK 2.14 (or even GTK 2.12).

What is left to be said is that I’m sorry for the troubles that this release might have caused for some LottaNZB users. There’s a positive side to the whole episode: I definitely learned alot and it tought me to avoid such things in the future, by testing ones code more extensively and on more platforms.

4 Responses

  1. Ash said:
    September 7th, 2009 at 3:42 am

    Well, I’m sure nobody blames you specifically. You’re working on this project in your own time, and nobody expects you to cover everything.

    The only critic you really need to pay attention to is yourself, everything else is secondary. It’s awesome that you’ve decided to work toward supporting 8.04, but don’t be too critical on yourself. It’s your project. :D

  2. Amaury said:
    September 8th, 2009 at 11:22 am

    I agree with what’s being said. Your project is really good :)

  3. SiNGH said:
    September 8th, 2009 at 6:19 pm

    I agree – it’s your project – it’s your world.

    I just cremated Windows over a year ago, it’s dead to me… and was so grateful for this project when I needed something to replace NewsLeecher (which I should point out still works really well via WiNE, but goes unused in favour of LottaNZB).

    I also really appreciate that this project is actively developed on and is constantly evolving into the Ultimate UseNet (+ NZB) Grabber. I’m impressed that you’re making the switch from the extinct HellaNZB to SABszbd (it takes a lot of work, so well done). Of course SABnzbd ROCKS!!! I’ve just installed it and tried the Web Interface = Wicked, but I also want a ‘solid’ application as a front-end (& not just Firefox), so I’ll be following this project (forever!).

    Thanx

    ^_^

  4. Severin said:
    September 13th, 2009 at 4:24 pm

    I hope you read the response to your comments at http://www.lottanzb.org/2009/09/re-how-not-to-release-software/ . :-)

    A minor correction regarding this post: LottaNZB 0.5 requires GTK 2.16 and not PyGTK 2.16. This isn’t the same. For example, Ubuntu 9.04 comes with GTK 2.16 and PyGTK 2.14 and runs LottaNZB just fine.

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