Christian Thaeter wrote:
some personal opinions...
A list of things which I would make me happy:
* More people contributing to the project.
* Help coding already planned and important things
* Send patches (git mob?) which fix existing issues.
Looking at Cinelerra, I'm amazed at how Linus manages to get anything
done with what must be a volley of patches that are flying all over the
place.
Git has the (big) advantage over svn in that if an ordinary Joe like me
downloads a repo, I have immediate source control for my own work -
whereas I'm given to understand that svn doesn't.
I think the problem we're seeing is that there's good code going into
mob that is not seeing its way upstream. And I don't think it ever will.
I'm not sure that the svn commiters pay much attention to what's going
into mob. Perhaps we need someone who will clear patches. This can be
difficult work. For example, I decided to take a look at the latest
commit. It was by Craig Lawson. Now, what I am about to say is in no way
meant to be a disrespect to Craig. If I were to review that commit,
then, as a raw developer in cine, I'd be trying to ask myself what the
problem is, and how his solution solved the problem. If I were doing my
job meticulously, I'd look up what roundf() does, and try to convince
myself that it does the right thing compared to int( ... + 0.5). I'd
also note what appears to be some dubious code quality ... there's a
block that seems repeated twice, but with slightly different values.
Again, I want to emphasise that I'm not criticising Craig! There'd be
quite a lot of work to do, even for a simple patch. From what little
I've seen of the Cinelerra code, it's a big victim of cut-and-paste
programming. I'm sure it did what it was supposed to do for the original
author at the time, but to an outsider, it's very very messy.
I think it would be very useful to have someone act as a clearing house
for bug fixes. It's /possible/ (no promises!) that I might have some
free time in the new year, and could contribute in this way.
* Caring for infrastructure,
Well, one thing that disappointed me recently is that I submitted a
patch that added some doc-building infrastructure. I created a
Makefile.am, which I think is a start to getting docs built
automagically. I incorporated the facility for generating info files, so
that you could type
info cinelerra
and get info about cinelerra. Now, admittedly, what I had submitted was
crude - from the "release early, release often" school - but it doesn't
look like my patch is ever going to make it into svn. That being the
case, I'm disinclined to polish my efforts further.
Things which don't turn me on and are a time sink:
* Adding more requests to the pile of things which have to be done.
Good point. I made a mistake when I added Ficl. Thankfully it never made
its way into the codebase!! - although you can still try it out from my
git repo (the ficl branch on my machine compiles fine). More than
anything, I think that Cinelerra needs stability over feature requests.
* Endless talks without productive outcome.
We need a Benevolent Dictator For Life! Well, maybe.
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