[vlc-devel] [PATCH 00/13] Execute medialib queries out of the UI thread

[Steve Lhomme]

On 2020-11-23 21:09, Rémi Denis-Courmont wrote:
> Le lundi 23 novembre 2020, 18:30:14 EET Romain Vimont a écrit :
>> Currently, the Qt interface for medialibrary executes database queries from
>> the UI thread. As a consequence, every I/O blocking results in a freeze of
>> the whole VLC interface.
> 
> Strictly speaking, local I/O never blocks, but whatever.
> 
>> In practice, on my computer, during medialibrary
>> indexation, it is common that VLC is frozen for tens of seconds (e.g. 45
>> seconds) on scrolling or click on a tab.
> 
> Well my experience is that, if I enable the media library, VLC crashes
> immediately because of some demuxer bug. This is totally unacceptable.
> 
> The root cause bug is most likely in an underlying library (and possibly
> failure of Debian to update), caused by a file in one of the standard media
> directory. Still, for the sake of reliability, it is totally insane and
> unacceptable that VLC crashes just because of a bug in a demuxer triggered by
> a file that is neither being played and in a directory that was not explicitly
> added.

One good reason never to put any abort() in the code, either in the core 
or modules.

> If this hits one out of a dozen of devs, how many million users will have VLC
> crash straight away?

The "crash" may just be an assert for developers. Regular users will not 
see it (depending how the error is handled).