This was mailed yesterday to all registered project members at SourceForge.  
For those who contributes from Hugin-PTX, many thanks to you too:

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: Happy New Year With Hugin
Date: January 9, 2011, 10:03:00 pm
From: Yuval Levy <[email protected]>

Hello contributors,

You receive this mail because you have access to Hugin's SourceForge project 
[0] and your code or translation live and thrives in the Hugin repository.

First of all, let me wish you a Happy New Year. 

I am writing to inform you about important changes to the project you have 
been contributing to, and to look back on the past year and forward to the 
future.  I hope that this is the first mail of a string of yearly project 
mails (ideally by somebody else, but for now I'll take the plunge).


THE IMPORTANT CHANGES FIRST

If you try to check out your code and you wonder where it has gone:  it now 
lives in Mercurial [1], like Enblend.  Also the trackers have moved [2] and 
Hugin now has a second home at Launchpad.  Our related projects Enblend and 
Panotools have moved the tracker to Launchpad as well this year.

If you are a developer, even if currently retired, I strongly recommend that 
you sign yourself up for the Hugin Developers Team [3].  And if you would like 
to put a hand under the hood and help with bug hunting, there is the Hugin Bug 
Hunters Team too [4].

Translators will notice that our codebase has grown and so the number of 
strings.  We'd appreciate if you could review the strings that were added 
since the last time you've contributed.

On Launchpad there is a tool to manage the whole release cycle of a project.  
You can see the whole Hugin history depicted there [5].


THE YEAR FOR HUGIN

Hugin had another great year of growth and successes.

For the second year in a row we managed three releases, one better than the 
other.

For the fourth year in a row Hugin participated to the Google Summer of Code 
and this year the four students were successful.

The development and release processes introduced two years ago are now well 
oiled.  The backlog of new code awaiting integration is shrinking.  In case 
you own one of the old branches in the repository and the code has not been 
merged yet, it is time to chime in.

Process documentation [6] is improving fast.  The goal is to lower the 
barriers to entry and document everything to a so that new contributors can 
come easily on board.  Indeed with the last release also had the support of so 
many users that binaries were available almost simultaneously as source 
tarball.  A little bit of advance notice and planning helped, but most of this 
is to the credit of those who took it upon them to turn that source thing into 
useful software.

In marketing term, the last release could be deemed to be "feature complete" 
and to underline the achievement, the application has received a facelift.

You will excuse me for not mentioning names - there are too many of them and I 
would risk forgetting one or two.  Credits are duly given in Hugin's credits 
list.


NEXT YEAR FOR HUGIN 

The year has just started and a new release is already shaping up, with the 
code from the last Google Summer of Code 2010 project that requires 
integration.

The project is learning to make use of its new infrastructure.  We're still 
not at cruising speed with Launchpad, but we're getting there.

There are interesting and animated discussions on the mailing list [7] about 
product vision, the user interface, a python binding and other cool stuff.

The community is healthy - new people join regularly and replace those that 
move on to other interest.

I don't know if this year again we'll be blessed with a Google Summer of Code 
participation; and what if any new features will emerge from the public;  but 
I am sure that it won't be a boring year and that at the end of the year Hugin 
will be in better shape than ever.

Thanking you for your past contributions, I look forward to see you active 
around our code base again.

Yuv





[0] <http://sourceforge.net/project/memberlist.php?group_id=77506>
[1] <http://hugin.hg.sourceforge.net/hgweb/hugin/>
[2] <https://bugs.launchpad.net/hugin>
[3] <https://launchpad.net/~hugin-devs>
[4] <https://launchpad.net/~hugin-bug-hunters>
[5] <https://launchpad.net/hugin/+series>
[6] <http://wiki.panotools.org/Development_of_Open_Source_tools>
[7] <http://groups.google.com/group/hugin-ptx>

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