The end of another Redland bughunt - all praise valgrind! It finally managed to find where Redland was crashing when used with PHP and the serialization (writing syntax) class. It was a combination of PHP and SWIG conspiring to do the wrong thing with a null string and NULL object pointer, a configuration error on my part.
This debugging was made much harder by the annoying things that are threads, which seem to be used more and more with useful shared libraries, causing debugging nightmares. Does anyone understand how to get gdb to do the right thing with this? I certainly don't, mostly facing a dead stack trace until the planets align right and it'll let me set a breakpoint in a shared-library that isn't loaded yet, let me run the code and stop at the breakpoint. Bah!
Anyway, onwards. Added some defensive code to try to catch this
thing again and in the course of updating the debug code, found the
__func__ pseudo-variable in C99 which is handy and can
replace a lot of hand-coded bits.
Things seem to be building ok now, and the new MySQL backend for Redland is looking solid, so it's nearly time for another release. It always seems to take a week to do that, rather than sling the code out the door untested.
As an aside, I forgot to mention last week I helped build Planet RDF based on existing code my friends had, with me mostly providing the additional hacking for fixing the mess that is HTML in RSS and the glue to make the thing update. It's looking good.