[solved] Downgrade OpenSesame to v2.9.6 on Ubuntu?

ACaterin

Hi,

With some help, in the past I created an OpenSesame experiment with a very particular structure: it included multiple types of stimuli (e.g., words and sounds), which were grouped into multiple blocks of 5. I needed the block types to occur randomly (e.g., maybe 2 blocks of words, followed by 1 block of sounds and so on, randomly), and also wanted the 5 stimuli within a block to be presented randomly. What I wanted to be fixed was the membership of stimuli to a given block (same 5 stimuli would always co-occur within the same block). With some inline script items, someone managed to do this for me, and have OpenSesame read the stimulus list from a .csv file, and then randomise them before being displayed, according to the rules I mentioned above.

However, since I upgraded to OpenSesame 3.0.1, the experiment stopped working - basically it only displays the initial and final sketchpad items, while skipping the whole experimental task. There is no error message at all... Rather than re-write the whole experiment to be compatible with the changes from v.3.0.1 (when I need to start testing participants asap), I was trying to downgrade to v.2.9.6, the last one I probably had before things went wrong... I already have the cogsci PPA repository added on Ubuntu 14.04, and in the Terminal I attempted to do: sudo apt-get install opensesame=2.9.6-ubuntu1. This leads to the error:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: Version ‘2.9.6-ubuntu1’ for ‘opensesame’ was not found

Can you please help with suggestions on how to get v2.9.6 back on Ubuntu? I would really appreciate the help greatly! Many thanks

sebastiaan

Hi,

Ubuntu PPAs don't preserve old versions, which is why your approach doesn't work, which is otherwise correct. I uploaded deb packages for OpenSesame 2.9.7 (you might as well use the latest maintenance release if you're going to stick to the 2.9 series) and QProgEdit 2.1.0. You need to downgrade both:

• https://github.com/smathot/OpenSesame/releases/tag/release/2.9.7

You can download these packages and then downgrade with:

sudo dpkg --install opensesame_2.9.7-ubuntu1_all.deb python-qprogedit_2.1.0-ubuntu1_all.deb

If you're using the xpyriment back-end, you also need to downgrade Expyriment to 0.7.0, which is still available from Oliver's PPA (and NeuroDebian I believe):

• https://launchpad.net/~lindemann09/+archive/ubuntu/expyriment

And if you're using PyGaze, you also need to dowgrade PyGaze to 0.5.0. (Let me know if you need to do that.)

Importantly though, OpenSesame 3.0 shouldn't break your old experiments. Could you help figure out where things go wrong, so I can fix this? Could upload the script somewhere?

Cheers,
Sebastiaan

ACaterin

Thanks! I have just sent you an email with the experiment files, so you can take a look at how it skips the tasks... Meanwhile, thanks very much for the help above, just now I tried to get v2.9.7 up and running. Managed to do this thanks to your help, and now the experiment is working again without problems... Hmm. :-)

sebastiaan

The problem was due to incorrect handling of single quotes in conditional statements. For example, here:

[my_var] = 'text'

... the quotes around 'text' were taken as part of the string, rather than as quoting characters. The following would work though:

[my_var] = text

I filed an issue on this (#356).

So the mystery is resolved, but, in any case, it's probably best to stick to 2.9.7 if that's the version you developed with.

ACaterin

I did a really quick check and yes, the experiment now starts going through the tasks, rather than skip them! I think I would never have figured out it was the quotation marks causing the issue. So, thanks so much for your help; I appreciate all your work with OpenSesame, it's great!