Present Perfect

Pfff. A whole day of fighting against a mesmerizing bug in either of python, gnonlin, gst-python, or pygtk. A simple program that did nothing more than

import gst
gst.element_factory_make("gnltimeline")

was throwing an assertion in python's garbage collector. I had this problem on FC2, FC3, and FC4. Edward didn't have this particular problem on his Gentoo machine, and Jan wasn't having it on his Breezy install (which has pygtk 2.7.something, by the way), even though his breezy was broken in other places.

Of course, I didn't have a need for this particularly short program, but for some reason gnltimeline triggers creation of some object that gets garbage-collected in my application where I do want to use it, even if I keep the element around. In Edward's examples, it only asserts when leaving the application; but when I use it, it asserts as soon as Python garbage-collects after creating.

We tried a lot of different approaches, and in the end I just gave up. Days like these are lost forever. It probably didn't help that I was still a bit tired after last night's Xiph meeting at 2 AM, but still - compared to last week's excellent flow in dire circumstances (more later) this day was an absolute low point.

Pfff. A whole day of fighting against a mesmerizing bug in either of python, gnonlin, gst-python, or pygtk. A simple program that did nothing more than import gst gst.element_factory_make("gnltimeline") was...