Bruno Postle wrote: > Thanks to everyone responsible for this release! Thanks to you for picking up the pieces and bringing the process I left suspended to completion. Good job!
Also congratulations to James for merging into trunk the layout branch. You guys have done an excellent job at absorbing the backlog of new features/developments and preparing Hugin for more. I'm less sanguine about what I read has happened on this mailing list / community in the past two months. Following are my observations about the past two months, the immediate future, and the far future. THE PAST TWO MONTHS Looking at the list from a distance, I see more than what I can / want to tolerate of (in no particular order) 1 - (unintentional but avoidable) mistakes 2 - trolling 3 - partial lack of direction, sense of purpose 1- I replied to the one uninformed and unintentional mistake that IMHO should not be left unaddressed [0]. There were some more, minor technical ones. The technical documentation is out there to set thing straight [1]. Most contributors have stepped in and understood the separation of development cycles from release cycles and its advantages. I deem the restructuring of the repository a "milestone accomplished". The occasional uninformed and unintentional mistake should be addressed, first and foremost with some self-responsibility of the contributor. 2 - I made an effort to ignore the troll even when I see smart people fall for it; and when I see misconceptions spread. Subject matter is secondary in a troll. Community reaction is what matters. Silence is the best reaction to a troll. But not to personal attacks. I am disappointed at how this community has done things the other way around: so much subject matter discussion (that mostly went nowhere) and little reaction to personal attacks, veiled and direct. [2] [3]. 3 - The partial lack of direction and sense of purpose relates specifically to the Windows version. My plan was to bring the Windows support in line with the excellent Mac support. My wish was to achieve this for the release of the layout branch (2010.2) and from then on to keep tracking closely the tarball releases, like the OSX bundles have been doing for some time. I suspect it is an unrealistic wish. The undertaking is bigger than what most people who have rushed in "support" of a Windows version think. It starts with the SDK that is not even defined. It takes a process of keeping things updated and in sync. Unfortunately, while Windows users clearly express the wish for a binary installer, most of those who achieve partial (or full) results on their own machine stop short of publishing/sharing and helping others to build on top of their results. The wheel is being reinvented constantly. Windows users seem not to learn from those who have been through it before them. Search this lists' archives. I have tried to pass on the knowledge / build up people's ability to contribute the individual parts of the SDK. I have tried to structure the effort. I consider the current status of Windows support to be my biggest failure over my past three years with Hugin, but I lack the support, resources and motivation to fix this. A quick fix would be to install a clean Windows environment, SDK, and build Hugin itself. Probably a week of work. Then come quality assurance and release, which is in itself easily another few days. It would be short-lived though, and unless properly maintained over the long term it would quickly become obsolete. I still have a clear plan in mind, but with so little interest from Windows users to listen and contribute it is not worthwhile to repeat what I've already been saying on this list for more than a year. Search the archives. IMMEDIATE FUTURE Hugin moves on, and 2010.0 will come along well with or without me. The tracks are laid. My first and foremost goal, when contributing to a project is to make myself redundant. Only so can the project be viable in the long term; and only so I can progress to higher levels. Bruno has done a great job at picking up the pieces of the 2009.4 release, but I wish for somebody new to drive the 2010.0 release. If Hugin is to survive, it needs a next generation to step in. Then you need somebody to drive GSoC 2010 participation, if you want to participate again. The mentoring organization is up there. For now Pablo, Alexandre, and I have admin access. I won't be available in 2010. You'll have to start preparing in a few weeks if you want to be ready. The developers will take care of fixing the bugs introduced with the new features in trunk. I have no doubt about this. Trunk is in a better state than ever, and you developers rock. The immediate future will be without me. I will stay member of the group via the web but will not revert to receive it in my mailbox. I wish all of you well - in Hugin or in your other endeavors. I have sent a little personal something to few of you. It may still be in the tangles of the postal service, or it may have gone lost in the Holidays frenzy at the world's postal offices or at customs. Or I may have forgotten you, in which case I apologize. FAR FUTURE I had a few things in mind for Hugin. Adding Mercurial repositories for development while keeping SVN for the release cycle; a visual revamp of the app based on the beautiful icons produced by Cristian that would have given also the website a face-lift. Much of the work that I had already done has been re-purposed for the new Enblend- Enfuse website, although there is still a lot of things to do before that framework can be used for the Hugin website, which is more complex and supports many languages. And then I wanted to re-engineer the Hugin user interface. Oh well... I am sure others have ideas too - there have been plenty of them expressed on this list. Maybe somebody will have the courage to make their ideas come true. Personally I don't know what is in my future, so you may see me back implementing the one or other of these ideas, or I may disappear in the convenient anonymity of the average user. I have a new camera and the man in red brought me a fishy present. You can see the first video tutorial on my blog [4] and I will keep posting stuff, some of it photography and panorama related, on my blog. Wishing all of you a Happy New Year! Yuv [0] http://groups.google.com/group/hugin-ptx/msg/404873e42a5c0c7b [1] http://wiki.panotools.org/Development_of_Open_Source_tools [2] http://groups.google.com/group/hugin-ptx/browse_thread/thread/935d140fa7dc80df [3] http://groups.google.com/group/hugin-ptx/browse_thread/thread/6381fe40937a1cad [4] http://panospace.wordpress.com/2009/12/24/nodal-ninja-calibration-tutorial/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "hugin and other free panoramic software" group. 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