Re: [Denemo-devel] Denemo hangs on quit when device is in use

[Dominic Sacré]

On Friday 18 May 2012 11:28:29 Richard Shann wrote:
> > Ugh... The "type ENTER" message comes from PortMidi, not from Denemo 
> > itself. Instead of letting us handle (or ignore) the error, PortMidi
> > waits  for user input, which really is a terrible thing for a
> > library to do.
> 
> ... it as if they are deliberately being obstructive - you cannot even
> use atexit() to catch the error and save your score because they hang
> on stdin which may not be connected to anything. For this reason I
> disallowed use in Denemo of the Input->Midi action while a score is
> unsaved, in case the midi keyboard is switched off and portmidi pulls
> that trick. We really should put it to the developers of portmidi that
> they shouldn't be doing this by default (if indeed they need to do it
> at all!).

Older PortMidi releases can apparently be built in two different ways: 
There's a CMake-based build system, but for Linux there's also a 
handwritten Makefile provided in the PortMidi tarball.
Only the latter defines the PM_CHECK_ERRORS macro, which causes this 
unfortunate prompt-and-exit behavior, and the Debian package is built 
using that Makefile.

So, as far as I can see this has already been fixed in PortMidi, and in 
the latest PortMidi release (from October 2010) the old Makefile is gone 
entirely. The real issue seems to be bad and outdated packaging by 
distributions...


Dominic