Hi,
thank you all for your helpful and diverse input! I also agree with most of
what has been said. Even though I do have time to contribute to LMMS I do
not have the time for being the only primary developer, which has been a
severe problem in the past. It's true that the Git repositories on
Sourceforge are not very visible and thus it's hard to attract new
developers, so I'd prefer the Github solution as well. To make an immediate
start, I just created a development space on github.com/lmms with a
repository at github.com/lmms/lmms (currently uploading branches).
Hopefully this will ease collaborative development alot and allow easy
management of pull requests. I'm willing to continue managing development
on Github however I'd vote for choosing someone else as project manager who
does not only coordinate development but all the aspects that were
mentioned in this thread.
Nevertheless this will not solve problems with patches which we simply
can't accept due to the code quality. I know that much of the historically
grown code is a mess too, but many patches in the past did not even meet
basic coding style guidelines (
http://lmms.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Guidelines_on_coding_style) and
often the visual integration into the existing UI has not been satisfying.
So what we definitely need is a team of UI designers!
Another oberservation I recently made: rolling-releases are the only way to
go. When we started the stable 0.4 series we branched off the master branch
and basically overloaded it with new features and massive changes leading
to a completely diverged source code base. Thus bug fixes to the stable-0.4
series began to be lost in the master branch. Today the master branch is a
mess and IMHO it's not suitable for stabilization anymore. I therefore
recently started to pick all the goodies from it and backport it to
different branches based on the 0.4 series (done so far: improved undo/redo
support, new FX mixer with sends etc.). This way we can stabilize features
individually and merge them little by little into continuous releases. For
the next release it's probably a good idea to stabilize what has been
integrated recently. The release afterwards should integrate the improved
undo/redo support, the new logo (I think proposal 2 in the discussion one
year ago got the most votes) and maybe already the new FX mixer. I also
like the proposal to rename SongEditor to Sequencer and B+B-Editor to
"Pattern Editor". We need terminology consistency in other places as well
(e.g. "tacts" -> "bars").
What I'm planning to backport in the future (as it once has been developed
by me):
- new settings dialog
- Resources framework for locality-independent usage of resources (audio
files, project files, presets, ...)
- welcome screen
- new ProjectRenderer
To be taken care of soon:
- new UI concepts for abandoning most of the MDI stuff by making central
components have a fixed place with easy collapsing possibilities
About communication: for development purposes, I still prefer mailing lists
over forums or similiar as management of messages etc. is much easier. As
soon as the new development on Github is gaining momentum, certainly much
of the communication will happen on this platform directly.
As for the name I'd stick with LMMS as well but get rid of "Linux
MultiMedia Studio". However I'd leave a final decision up to a new project
manager and/or an extensive survey.
One more thought: IMHO we never claimed LMMS to be a real professional DAW.
We aim at hobby and semi-professional users. We surely can satisfy their
needs if LMMS development gains new momentum this year.
So far..
Toby
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