exacerbate and incapacitate (and, apparently, progress)

Ah, software. S for stupid, O for OMGWTF?!, F for [expletive deleted] etc.

Weird, weird bugs. Profoundly weird. So, converting from .ico to .png causes the same buffered stream bug(?) to throw a hissy fit and explode ze Prism into tiny shards of glass that hurt your soul. But, the other day when testing I chose a local .ico file, and for some reason it actually converted without crashing. To top things off, the /etc/mime.types entry for .ico was "image/x-ico" which isn't a standard MIME type. So, using a local .ico file caused the MIME service to report "image/x-ico" which in turn actually made Prism convert the .ico to a .png. Even though there is no decoder for "image/x-ico"!

Furthermore, adding a ~/mime.types file (overrides the global in /etc/) and putting the correct "image/x-icon" type there caused the thing to explode once again.

[some time passed here when I started fooling around with my imaginary girlfriend an idea, instead of writing this blog post]

My hunch paid off. Increasing the buffer size for the nsIBufferedOutputStream from 1024 to 4096 (larger than the size of the file that's being converted, it's 1920 bytes) magically disappears the crashiness (this is for .ico to .png with the correct MIME type). And, trying to convert a larger file (21941 bytes) with that 4096 byte buffer still causes a crash (this is from .png to .png). I'd allow myself to call this progress.

I might just add that this crashes a nightly Firefox when using Refractor, so it's not just my XULRunner tree that's covered in ectoplasm. Naturally, I can't recall if all this actually worked earlier.

I now have a debug XULRunner build, so I started poking at the odd crasher that bug 420777 acts as a workaround for. Converting from PNG to PNG (which should work, even though it should never be done) causes the whole shebang to SIGABRT when trying to close the buffered output-stream. Turns out it's nsBufferedStream::Close() that is the bad guy, and not nsStorageStream as I previously had guessed. More specifically the line nsBufferedStreams.cpp:109. Cesar confirmed on IRC last week that it affected him as well, so either it's a glibc bug that's in both OpenSUSE 10.2 and Ubuntu 7.10 (IIRC), or it's a Mozilla problem. I have no idea at this point, but I'm leaning towards the latter.

(A partial stack trace is available here.)

flossing

It is surprisingly more satisfying than I had thought filing bugs, poking at the code and sometimes seeing p=nossralf in a check-in log. I mean, it's like a little buzz, more than a few synapses going "wheeee".

I've decided to learn a bit about the xpcshell HTTP server and writing unit tests for Mozilla in general, since Prism needs some lovin' in that department. Using the HTTP server makes sense, since it enables testing things such as the favicon downloader (and possibly aspects of Refractor as well). It may be too late to impact 0.9, but getting good unit test coverage won't make 1.0 kick any less ass.

And I need to get one of my other little projects, Tnedor, finished. It's a Python-based xbindkeys replacement with per-application settings (mouse buttons only for now). With an associated GUI application for setting up the configuration. Mouse settings on Linux suck. Bad. And reducing suck should be the goal of all software. (It's called Tnedor because Esuom sounds too Finnish and that's just wrong!)