[Scummvm-devel] Simon the Sorcerer appears to leak all it's audio ram

[Max Horn]

Folks,

my stance on this is as follows: It is *bad* if Simon just crashes on the
DS. Period. THis should *not* happen.

We have two ways to resolve this:

1) Neil's way, which silently ignores if a failure occurs to load a sound
(this change would be inside an #ifdef DS, of course). Kirben is opposed
to this, quoting additional bug reports which would supposedly turn up.
Kirben, can you please elaborate a bit on this -- what kind of bugs would
crop up due to this?

2) We add code which, on the DS, simply refuses to start the game, telling
people that it is not (yet) compatible with this port. Very ugly.


IMO, we should go with option 1 unless it's indeed clear that we are
exposing people to bad bugs this way. Given that 0.9.1 already does the
same hack, I right now would judge the risk of getting many additional bug
reports due to this low -- at least considering that we didn't get any so
far, AFAIK...

Finally, for the future I would like to remind everybody (esp. porters)
that you should clearly document workarounds and hacks, ideally by filing
reports on the bug tracker or by writing to scummvm-devel, instead of just
silently adding the workaround/hack. The sad truth is, I was recently
working on the whole (compressed) audio streaming code. I would have
happily added streaming code for the non-compressed code path, had I known
it was needed, and we could have avoided this discussion. As it is,
undocumented HACKs are note likely to ever be resolved, as they are
overlooked and do not get the attention they deserve.


Cheers,
Max