lua-users home
lua-l archive

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index] 



On 06/01/2016 06:42, Dirk Laurie wrote:

2016-01-05 23:06 GMT+02:00 Lorenzo Donati <lorenzodonatibz@tiscali.it>:



On 05/01/2016 21:12, Dirk Laurie wrote:


2016-01-05 19:18 GMT+02:00 Lorenzo Donati <lorenzodonatibz@tiscali.it>:




On 01/01/2016 15:30, Roberto Ierusalimschy wrote:


[snip]



As usual with Lua bugs, the bug and its fix have been reported
on http://www.lua.org/bugs.html. The description of the bug is:

    Metatable may access its own deallocated field when
    it has a self reference in __newindex.

The question asked was:  Should this bug require a "fast-track"
emergency bug-fix release of 5.3.3?

Lorenzo has ably summarized the reasons why it should, most
of which would be applicable to any bug. About the only one that
is unusual is that the fault shows up as a segfault, not a stack
overflow or some other error that can be trapped at the Lua level.

There are also reasons why it would be unusual to put out an
emergency bug-fix release of a new minor version, most of which
would be applicable to any bug.

1. The bug might not manifest itself on all machines.
2. The fix may introduce a new bug.
3. The combination of 1 and 2 would imply that an existing
working Lua version on that machine has needlessy been
broken.



OK, fair enough.


The Lua 5.3.1 bug "io.lines does not check maximum number
of options" also causes a segfault on my machine. The code
to trigger it is also nothing esoteric. Yet 5.3.2-rc1 was only released
four months later the bug was reported.
Of course I didn't mean Lua Team should urge to put a hastily conceived fix out of the door. I meant to ask whether this only bug was deemed so severe to warrant the *starting of the release procedure* (with all the due testing according to Lua Team's usual accuracy) without waiting some other bug to appear or some predefined amount of time (if there is such a thing in the Team's schedule). 



I don't think the self-referencing __newindex bug is any worse,
certainly not emergency material.

However, the word "patches" among the quick links on the Download
page
    http://www.lua.org/download.html
is perhaps a little cryptic. It would be helpful, in the situations that
Lorenzo has highlighted, to have a sentence explaining that bugs
(if any) reported after the release was frozen can be found there.
Yep, I didn't notice until now. The link is marked "patches", but the title of the page is "bugs". A little inconsistent. Maybe renaming the link to "bugs" as well would be better and clearer (especially for newbies which couldn't know what a "patch" is). If the authors deem the link should convey the info "here are the patches" then renaming both page and link to "bugs & patches" would be better IMO, although not as short and neat. 

The clarification sentence you mention could be put in some help popup
to appear as one hovers the mouse over the link.
Probably the best is to rename the link as "bugs" and put the mention of patches and the clarification in a popup for that link or/and in the top part of the bugs page. 

Cheers!

-- Lorenzo