Re: [fluid-dev] Some more thread safety commits and stuff

[David Henningsson]

address@hidden skrev:
> I just committed a bunch of multi-thread safety changes to the
> fluidsynth_event_queue branch.  

Glad to hear from you, and thanks for working on fluidsynth!

> Added SoundFont reference counting, presets now add references to
> SoundFonts.  SoundFonts are only unloaded after all presets relinquish
> their references.

When a soundfont is unloaded (e g by a shell command), will the channels
somehow receive a message and unload their current presets or will the
soundfont stay in memory until they give up their presets?

> I realize now that we have probably missed the Ubuntu deadline that
> David had mentioned.  

The Karmic deadline is probably missed, yes. Next deadline for Ubuntu is
in December. (There were discussions that Debian would freeze in
December as well, but I'm not sure whether that it will actually be that
way.) I will need some time to work on the packaging as well, so some
margin would be appreciated.

I don't want the FluidSynth project to feel chained to these deadlines
though - there are a lot more distributions and OSes that FluidSynth is
a part of.

> In hindsight, we should probably have released a
> 1.0.10 without the more ambitious thread safety changes.  I'm going to
> continue plugging away at making FluidSynth thread safe, which I think
> we are close to now, but we should perhaps still consider the option of
> releasing a 1.0.10 version. When the thread safe changes are complete,
> there is likely a bit of testing that is in order to make sure there
> aren't any issues, since the changes are not so trivial.

If we look back in time, I see all the bugs we've fixed and the new
functionality we've implemented, so it would be great if the rest of
FluidSynth community could enjoy that as well! I strongly support
releasing a new version, the sooner the better. (Given that we test it
first, of course.)

> As to the previous discussion about glib dependency.  I have once again
> flip-flopped on my decision.  It seems to me that the features we want
> to use from glib are minimal (hash tables, lists and threading related
> data types).  

That's not completely true; it might be the only features we currently
use, but if we start to use glib we can start to use it for more things.

> Testing results on the fluidsynth_event_queue branch would be
> appreciated!  

Sure.

> Perhaps we should merge it back into trunk soon?

To me, the branch has actually always been stable enough to merge into
trunk. And if there are remaining bugs, the sooner we find them, the
better. So feel free to merge it when you want to.

// David