Bart's suggestion to build release build regularly

[Mark Kretschmann]

On Mon, Dec 27, 2010 at 12:22 PM, Bart Cerneels <bart.cerneels at kde.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 27, 2010 at 10:36, Valorie Zimmerman
> <valorie.zimmerman at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I saw notice of this new commit this morning in #amarok:
>>
>> [01:16] <CIA-50> Bart Cerneels master * rv2.3.90-82-geff5427
>> amarok/src/ (5 files in 3 dirs):
>> [01:16] <CIA-50> Include updated category in signal.
>> [01:16] <CIA-50> Also remove one more layoutChanged which can cause crashes.
>> [01:16] <CIA-50> Bart Cerneels master * rv2.3.90-83-ge0f951c
>> amarok/src/core-impl/podcasts/sql/ (SqlPodcastProvider.cpp
>> SqlPodcastProvider.h):
>> [01:16] <CIA-50> Trigger reset of the treeView less.
>> [01:16] <CIA-50> Having the podcast trees collapse on each action is
>> more annoying then having a non-updated icon until moused-over.
>> [01:16] <CIA-50> Bart Cerneels master * rv2.3.90-81-g8806b96 amarok/.gitignore:
>> [01:16] <CIA-50> Rename dedicated release build dir.
>> [01:16] <CIA-50> I recommend everyone build and test with
>> CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=release regularly.
>> [01:16] <CIA-50> There are much reported crashes that only can be
>> reproduced with a release build.
>>
>> The way I always build, with the assistance of Myriam's blog, uses
>> cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$HOME/kde -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=debugfull
>> $HOME/kde/src/amarok
>>
>> Bart, are you advising that sometimes we use CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=release
>> rather than the above? Also? And since I'm usually pulling the latest
>> from git, would this still work? Or is this dedicated release build
>> dir different, to be built with a different cmake command line?
>>
>> Or should I consider that your commit message was only to your fellow
>> developers, and I should continue my current testing behavior?
>>
>> All the best,
>>
>> Valorie
>>
>
> I've just noticed some crashes never seem to be reproducible by us
> developers or tester. Since we all (seem to) build with debugfull to
> get useful traces it's likely we'll not be able to reproduce this. So
> I started to regularly install a release build to see if any changes I
> recently did fixed crashes.
>
> I don't know enough of the build system to know why release builds
> seem to crash more.
>
> It's possible -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo makes these crashes
> reproducible while still being able to get traces but I haven't tried
> yet.

I can't really see how a release build could make stuff crash more, or
why it would do that. Maybe because of compiler optimizing?

But then again, the mysteries of GCC are deep, and many. Who knows :)

-- 
Mark Kretschmann
Amarok Developer, Software Engineer at KO GmbH
Fellow of the Free Software Foundation Europe
http://amarok.kde.org - http://fsfe.org - http://kogmbh.com