Wednesday 9th April 2008
Fedora Project
Finally found some time to look at the pile of bugs that have built up on bittorrent, and apply some fixes. I guess the bugzilla triaging effort and yesterday's Final Freeze for Fedora 9 were enough to spur me on. In additional to updating Rawhide, I cloned the package for Fedora 7 and 8 and requested they be pushed to the testing repositories.
Bug #189072 (bittorrent doesn't die gracefully)
- This one is about the GUI not saving fastresume data when the client is killed (e.g. when the user logs out) rather than shut down cleanly. Would need help from someone with better python skills to fix this. I've left the ticket open.
Bug #189295 (bittorrent is not utf-8 aware)
This one was raised on Fedora 6 and is about the curses client not displaying non-ASCII characters properly. This mainly affects non-English locales and as such doesn't manifest itself in Fedora 7 onwards because translations don't work at all (Bug #237254). I've left this one open.
Bug #204622 (bittorrent takes an unreasonable amount of memory and has a memory leak)
I suspect that this was a bug elsewhere and in fact a duplicate of Bug #221124, where upgrading other packages fixed the problem. I've left the ticket open but it'll get closed as WONTFIX as part of the BugZappers/F9CleanUp process if the reporter doesn't confirm that there's still a problem in a current release within the next month.
Bug #223623 (bittorrent-5.0.5 and wxPython-2.8)
This one is about the incompatibility of bittorrent-gui 5.x and wxPython > 2.6; all 5.x versions are affected by this (5.0.5 was in Rawhide briefly during the Fedora 7 development phase, where this problem first showed up). As upstream have gone closed source with version 6.x and nobody seems to be doing any ongoing development on the 5.x versions, I've closed this one as CANTFIX.
Bug #230878 (bittorrent-curses does not show upload activity and produces setrlimit message)
This was a problem that was present in bittorrent 5.0.5, which was briefly in Rawhide; since Fedora is highly unlikely ever to include a 5.x version again (see Bug #223623), I closed this one as CURRENTRELEASE (it's not a problem in 4.4.0).
Bug #231697 (RPM install scripts don't create homedir for torrent user)
I fixed this one a year ago actually (bittorrent-4.4.0-4.fc6) but the ticket was still open so I closed it as ERRATA.
Bug #237254 (bittorrent-gui missing translations)
The translations provided by upstream don't work in Fedora 7 onwards, though they did in Fedora 6. Appears to be that something has changed in the way translations work in python 2.5 (Fedora 6 had python 2.4.x) and this has probably broken things. I've left this one open.
Bug #237256 (Error in about dialog)
This one crept in when downgrading Rawhide from 5.0.5 back to 4.4.0. The 5.0.5 version didn't include the credits-l10n.txt file, and I didn't add it back into the %files list for the package when downgrading, and this caused the problem. An easy fix - just include the file.
Bug #245421 (bittorrent fastresume does not work (because of python incompatibility?))
A python 2.5 compatibility issue that caused the fastresume data not to be saved correctly. Somebody kindly included a reference to a fix for this on the ticket, so it was an easy fix with a small patch, and I changed the bug status to ON_QA after requesting the updates for Fedora 7 and 8 be pushed to the testing repository.
Bug #365361 (bittorrent: use xdg-open for opening a browser)
This was one of a series of bugs opened against various applications to get them to use xdg-open to open the user's chosen browser rather than doing it in an application-specific way. However, bittorrent already hands over this choice to the webbrowser module in python, so I closed the bug as a DUPLICATE of Bug #388531, the corresponding ticket for python itself.
Bug #440906 (FTBFS bittorrent-4.4.0-5.fc7)
The Rawhide bittorrent package wasn't building successfully because python-based packages in Fedora 9 onwards now include egg-info data, and that wasn't accounted for in the %files list for the package. Another easy fix; as this was a Rawhide bug, I was able to close it as RAWHIDE once the package was built in koji.
Bug #430849 (bittorrent track/generate/seed fails, and documents do not help)
This one was about the documentation for creating torrents and running the seed/tracker services, which consisted of upstream's README.txt and was clearly inadequate (and in fact wrong in some parts). I added an additional file README.Fedora to improve the situation and changed the bug status to ON_QA after requesting the updates for Fedora 7 and 8 be pushed to the testing repository.
In addition to those bugs, I also moved the default data directory out of /srv to /var/lib/bittorrent because Fedora policy is not to include anything under /srv in packages (see PackagingDrafts/NoBitsInSrv), and also silenced some "deprecated function" warnings that originated from pygtk2.
I also managed to get the updated Rawhide package included in Fedora 9 Final despite missing the Final Freeze date, by making a successful appeal to the Fedora Release Engineering team 
A busy day!