Edward Andrew Robinson

I wrote about Democracy a month ago, back then the biggest comment that I got was that Democracy wouldent work for them. Democracy just released version 0.9.6 today and in the release post they claimed to have fixed support for feisty. Now I have been running the stock version that comes in the Ubuntu repository’s and I must say it is a product that once you use it you will never go back. I love coming home and having all of my vlogs downloaded for me ready to watch, I just wish I could find more Ubuntu vlogs, if anyone can find some let please post a link in the comments. I’m quite adventurous when it comes to Ubuntu and I will install anything weather or not I think it will break my system. So I backed up my ~/.democracy folder added the democracy repository, they have a great tutorial by the way, to my sources.list and upgraded.

First thing that happens when you run democracy is that it will “upgrade” the storage system for all your subscribed vlogs, this is why I backed up my democracy folder, and then it seg faults.

earobinson@NaN:~$ democracyplayer
/usr/bin/democracyplayer:87: DeprecationWarning: The dbus_bindings module is deprecated and will go away soon.

dbus-python 0.80 provides only a partial emulation of the old
dbus_bindings, which was never meant to be public API.

Most uses of dbus_bindings are applications catching the exception
dbus.dbus_bindings.DBusException. You should use dbus.DBusException
instead (this is compatible with all dbus-python versions since 0.40.2).

If you need additional public API, please contact the maintainers via
.

import dbus_bindings
/var/lib/python-support/python2.5/dbus_bindings.py:5: DeprecationWarning: The dbus_bindings module is deprecated and will go away soon.

dbus-python 0.80 provides only a partial emulation of the old
dbus_bindings, which was never meant to be public API.

Most uses of dbus_bindings are applications catching the exception
dbus.dbus_bindings.DBusException. You should use dbus.DBusException
instead (this is compatible with all dbus-python versions since 0.40.2).

If you need additional public API, please contact the maintainers via
.

from dbus.dbus_bindings import *
INFO Starting up Democracy Player
INFO Version: 0.9.6
INFO Revision: unknown
INFO Loading preferences…
INFO Starting event loop thread
INFO Restoring database…
INFO Connecting to /home/earobinson/.democracy/sqlitedb
TIMING Database load slow: 0.463
INFO Recomputing filters…
INFO Spawning auto downloader…
INFO Displaying main frame…
WARNING Menu item action “CheckVersion” not implemented
WARNING Menu item action “FastForward” not implemented
WARNING Menu item action “Rewind” not implemented
WARNING Menu item action “UpVolume” not implemented
WARNING Menu item action “DownVolume” not implemented
WARNING Volume changed before videoDisplay created
WARNING Display updated before video display was created
INFO Creating video display…
INFO *** Launching Downloader Daemon ****
alsa
oss
pulseaudio
file
none
INFO loaded renderer ‘xinerenderer’
INFO Setting VolumeLevel to 1.0
TIMING gtkAsyncMethod: took too long: 1.483
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

This was what I had expected from a product that had gone since the 2 months without upgrading to support feisty. I posted in the comments about what happened hoping to warn users that this may break the version of democracy that they have installed.

What I did not expect was about an hour and a half later there is a response in the comments from Nicholas Reville, who i can only assume is a democracy employ, that says that they are working on it. Another two and a half hours later Ben (another democracy employ?) posts to say they have fixed the problem. The great part of this is that they had. All in all it took them about 4 hours to fix the problem and upload it to the democracy repository.

This makes me ask the question, is it worth the upgrade. The ubuntu MOTU, do a great job of ensuring that every package that makes it into the Ubuntu repository is a working and quality package. Not only did democracy leave the feisty version of democracy broken for months but they don’t seem to test that much before they release a new version, however they did release a fix quickly. The version of democracy in the Ubuntu repository was working for me (thanks to the ubuntu MOTU), but I love the bleeding edge.

I for one will upgrade to the new version of democracy, but I will do so knowing that in the future things may break and that I will keep a backup of both the install deb files and my ~/.democracy folder just in case things break again and they don’t provide an upgrade for another 2 months. What are you going to do?