[kdenlive] Apologies and explanations

[Gus Scheidt]

JB,

As a fellow developer, I can sympathize with your situation.  I commend you
for your quick response, your honest explanation, and your efforts to
prevent such issues in the future.

Thanks again for all of your work on Kdenlive.

~Gus


On Sun, May 29, 2016 at 2:51 PM Jean-Baptiste Mardelle <jb at kdenlive.org>
wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> As you might know, a recent bug in Kdenlive's git master caused major data
> loss to some users. I am deeply sorry about it and would like to provide
> some details about what happened, why and what we did and plan about it.
>
> 1- what happened:
>
> In Kdenlive, we sometimes manage a lot of temporary data. As I was working
> on a new feature (timeline preview), it generated lots of temporary
> rendered videos. So at some point, this data needs to be deleted. To do
> this, I used a standard Qt class, QDir. However, if for some reason QDir is
> not correctly initialized or an operation fails, it defaults to your home
> directory. You can guess the end. As with many bugs, the error did not
> trigger everytime, so when I tried it before committing, I did not realize
> the possible problem.
>
> 2 - how could such stupid code be committed:
>
> One of the reason it was committed is that I have been working too much in
> the last weeks. Working on Kdenlive is great, but at some point I went too
> far. Combined with my day job, I did not sleep enough and committed this
> stupid mistake.
>
> 3 - what about the future, is it safe to use Kdenlive ?
>
> As soon as I realized the extend of the problem, I commented out the
> problematic code and deleted the PPA packages. Git master is safe now, as
> is current kdenlive-master PPA built from the 26th of May :
> kdenlive - 4:16.07.70+git201605260633~ubuntu16.04.1
>
> Causing data loss on our users deeply affected me, and I think it should
> also be a big reminder for everyone that using a daily built development
> version from git is not safe, and that you must backup your data!
>
> I will put a big warning now on the development version, and will discuss
> with Vincent about possible changes in our PPA/development policy to help
> prevent such problems.
>
> I will also of course revise our temporary data handling to make sure such
> a mistake does not happen twice.
>
> So again, I send my sincere apologies and hope we can continue to move
> forward in the next months.
>
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>
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