[redland-dev] Re: Redland project update Sep 2007

[Lauri Aalto]

Hello world,

On 9/29/07, Dave Beckett <dave at dajobe.org> wrote:
>   Lauri Aalto - who has been committing a lot of resilience patches
>     (for when memory is low, in error cases), portability and fixing
>     other functionality bugs.
>
> Welcome!  I'll let them say more themselves.

Thanks, Dave.

My main focus is getting Redland work smoothly on Symbian OS.

I've developed various kinds of software for fun and profit for about
20 years now. A few months ago I started working as a contractor on an
assignment that requires RDF storage, serializers and SPARQL query
engine on Symbian devices. Porting Redland to Symbian seemed to solve
many of our problems.

Porting Redland was not difficult and implementing a custom module
rdf_storage wasn't painful either. Everything works quite well on a
sunny day, only a handful of bugs was found.

Then I started writing rainy day tests, i.e. running the use cases we
need as test cases inside a heap failure tool with memory leak
checking. After all, we use Redland as a part of a service that runs
potentially for months in a resource-constrained environment. Memory
leaks are not tolerable in a process that runs that long. System calls
like memory allocations do fail (there's only a little RAM and no
virtual memory) so the software needs to deal with failures gracefully
and not just abort or crash. Debugging and fixing hundreds of issues
like that has brought me quite intimate with Redland internals. I
think I have yet only scratched the surface with these fixes - there's
still a lot of work to do.

It's nice to get paid for contributing to an open source project :)

Lauri