We do need to define a release process, but I think there is a bigger issue here that contributes to disorganization around releases. I've been thinking that the biggest issue Mixxx faces is a shortage of labor. Testing and reviewing pull requests is a lot of work, hence why I started this thread to try to get more people involved in that.
Right now we have a lot of responsibility falling on very few people, so if one or two of them have less time to work on Mixxx it holds up everything. This is not a good situation, and I think the only fair way out of it is to get more people involved. I think we should consider what we can do to attract and retain more developers for Mixxx. Obviously, making the software better is a good start. Hopefully the new features and polishing in 2.1 will bring in more interest. Evidently though, putting code out in the open is not enough. I think we should consider the obstacles to contributing and how we can reduce them. I think the biggest issue is the lack of developer documentation. Comments in source code are helpful, but we also should have high level overviews of how the different parts of Mixxx fit together. Mixxx has a lot of code. It's difficult to start working on it, even to fix a small bug, without a considerable investment of time to understand what different parts of the code are doing and why it is organized that way. Requiring all new contributors to struggle through this themselves is inefficient. This information should be written out and easily accessible. We have http://mixxx.org/wiki/doku.php/developer_guide but it only covers a little bit of the core infrastructure. I think it would be a worthwhile investment of time after the 2.1 release to work on the Developer Guide. Having the project scattered across a different service and account system for each part of it is another annoying barrier. We have GitHub, Launchpad, our wiki, our forum, a Freenode IRC channel, and this SourceForge mailing list (which injects spam into every post...). That's a lot to sign up for and a lot to keep track of. I could understand how it would be bewildering for someone new to Mixxx to figure out where to go for information or how to contribute. However, I think this is a relatively minor issue though and the cost of switching services would be high. On 03/25/2017 08:12 AM, Josep Maria Antolin wrote: > I haven't commented on this yet, although I am involved in it too, as I > have several PRs pending approval. > > > My PRs are: > #1195 Restructuring related to recording dialog settings and encoders > #1171 Three fixes related to waveform generation, splitted from the > multithreaded-analysis branch > #1069 Multithreaded analysis > > First one is almost ready, pending some UI improvements, although I am > not so sure I can do it.(It adds 24bit and 32bit float for WAV and AIFF, > ABR and VBR for MP3 and FLAC encoding) > Second one seems ready (at least from my point of view), but hasn't been > merged yet. (As the name says, they are bugfixes related to waveform > generation) > Third one was ready, but it will require some changes once 1171 is > merged, because It's not up to date with those changes, and I think it > was not merged initially in order to change it to not use multiple > lists. I will need to work that a bit more, but as I said, 1171 has to > be merged first. (This one is mostly important for new users as well as > when adding many new tracks ) > > > Probably, the open source nature and lack of control about the features > that contributors decide to implement, is making harder to set a release > timeline, but it also feels a bit frustrating when PRs take long to get > ready to be merged. > > And this is only going to get worse for the "summer of code" (as in > having less resources to test and merge PRs). > > So maybe we, contributors included, need to sit down and put some > priorities and processes in place together, with the objective of > focusing on the release. I just don't know what can I do in this regard. > > And talking about Skins: It's something of which I don't have experience > yet. I'm not sure if i'm the right person for adapting any of those to > the new settings. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Get Mixxx, the #1 Free MP3 DJ Mixing software Today http://mixxx.org Mixxx-devel mailing list Mixxx-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mixxx-devel
