Week 16: Constant Optimization

This week saw the release of 1.3~rc1 sporting my tor-changes disguised as general acquire methods changes I mentioned last week as well as the revamp of apt talking to dpkg (and back) I worked on the last couple weeks as part of GSoC. It doesn't include any new planner, a stub is still lying in a wip branch, but our good old planner looks and behaves slight different, so it feels like a new one – and surprising as it is: So far no bugreport related to this. Probably all user systems caught instantly fire! 🙂

So, the week was further used to get used to cmake, build and run apt on various porterboxes to fix testcase failures, fixing other incomings and especially pull some hair out while debugging the bug of the week which lends the title to this blogpost: A one word fix for an issues manifesting itself only in optimization level -O3 on ppc64el. Optimizations are evil…

Beside causing quite some time waste for this week as well as in previous years it is also closing a loop: I introduced this problem myself while being a GSoC student… in 2010. Time really flies. And I have no idea what I was thinking either… I could be describing more of these "tiny" bugs, but the commit messages tend to do a reasonable job and if you are really that damn interested: Feel free to ask. 🙂

This next week will be the last official in GSoC from a students POV as I am supposed to clean up all bases & submit my work for the final evaluation – this submit will be as a blogpost describing & linking to everything, which equals miles long and relatively soon, so that I purposefully have kept this one a very short one so you will have enough energy to bear with me for the next one.