Ardour - support only for official builds?

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raboof
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Re: Ardour - support only for official builds?

Post by raboof »

Hello Johan,

I see you're new to the forum. Welcome! Judging from your post you must have missed some points that were discussed earlier in this thread. Please allowe me to summarize:
Johan wrote:You can also simply install Ardour from the linux distribution
This is, of course, correct!
Johan wrote:this is just from ardour itself and is simply supported.
This is not completely accurate. Most distributions do not distribute the binaries provided from the Ardour site, but build Ardour themselves. Of course they build Ardour from the same sources, but they might apply some patches to integrate it better with the distribution, or fix problems due to different library versions.

These versions are often very reliable, but unfortunately in the past there have also been distributions who made mistakes while building/adapting Ardour, or shipped very old versions. For that reason, the Ardour developers have made it clear that they only promise support for the official builds from their website, and not for rebuilds from distributions. For support for rebuilds, you can of course try to see if you can get help on this forum, or use the bug tracker of your distribution.
Johan wrote:Sorry for my bad English. This is done with google translate because my English is very bad.
No problem! If you want me to explain the above in your native language don't hesitate to let me know!
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Re: Ardour - support only for official builds?

Post by Johan »

That would be a big contrast since AVLinux and KxStudio have just as many bugs and crashes and no official builds by Ardour. https://discourse.ardour.org/t/comparin ... ns/87732/1 Do AVLinux and KxStudio therefore not receive Ardour support within the framework of this question as those Ardours because those versions are not official build?

And I find it strange and that's why I registered here to respond to this. Some of my friends and I have installed Ardor under Ubuntu and that works just fine.
It also lingers a bit in an old story seems to me. That was at the time of Ardour 2. But knowledge grows with time, also with Ubuntu.
It is known to me that Paul Davis once stopped the support, but that was already some years ago. Meanwhile, today the Ubuntu version is stable as it is offered and instead the latest versions are full of bugs. Understandable because normally with new versions, but the older stable ubuntu version no longer has those problems. Maybe somebody would have to install an Ubuntu version on a test computer to see for yourself.
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Re: Ardour - support only for official builds?

Post by raboof »

Johan wrote:That would be a big contrast since AVLinux and KxStudio have just as many bugs and crashes and no official builds by Ardour. https://discourse.ardour.org/t/comparin ... ns/87732/1 Do AVLinux and KxStudio therefore not receive Ardour support within the framework of this question as those Ardours because those versions are not official build?
If they ship the exact same binaries as available from the Ardour site then you could expect support from the Ardour team. If they use different self-built binaries, then you can't. I'm not sure in these particular cases - I seem to remember someone mentioned KXStudio ships the binaries from the Ardour website.
Johan wrote:today the Ubuntu version is stable as it is offered and instead the latest versions are full of bugs.
This may be! (though I have heard people very satisfied with the latest versions from the Ardour site as well).

However the topic of this thread is "support from the Ardour team". Hunting down a subtle bug can be hours or days of work, and you might not even find it then. It would be quite disappointing if someone from the Ardour team spends that time tracing a bug, only to find it was not a problem at the Ardour side at all, but in the way a particular distro built that package. That would be fairly poor use of the Ardour teams' time, so I can imagine they want to focus on the bugs that are definitely at the Ardour side (either in the core product or in the way they package it themselves).

I don't think it's necessarily a statement of quality (though that may have been part of it especially in the past), just a way to spend their time most effectively.
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Re: Ardour - support only for official builds?

Post by raboof »

raboof wrote:Hunting down a subtle bug can be hours or days of work, and you might not even find it then.
Oh, to clarify: while some bugs may not seem very "subtle" from the outside (i.e., "the whole program crashes when I load this plugin"), even in such cases the actual cause of the problem can be very intricate.
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Re: Ardour - support only for official builds?

Post by loxstep »

Only supporting official builds seems very reasonable.

The original thread is long, and I'm struggling to follow the whole story. But here's what I make of it: The person in question wanted support for a version of ardour that was in their distros repo. But the developers are willing to support their official binary, which you can get through their website.

They charge a fee for the official build, don't they? It makes sense that you need to pay in order to get support.

I do not pay for ardour builds, but I donate to the project from time to time. It's so important to my workflow. I benefit when the devs can work on the project and not have to worry about rent or food bills. If you haven't paid for the product, then nobody has any obligation to give you free support. If you need free support, that's what communities like this are for.
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