Hi Dominik,
thanks for being open. I'm sure there is much you always wanted to know about
OpenSG (but were too afraid to ask ;).
On 01/12/2010 06:14 AM, Dominik Rau wrote:
> Hi there.
>
> As a long time OpenSG user, I'm a bit worried about the state of OpenSG.
> Some months (years?) ago, there was a lengthy discussion on this list
> about the (bad) marketing of OpenSG. Unfortunately, it never was worse
> than it is today.
True.
> If I would be a new user (not knowing this mailing list) I would
> consider OpenSG dead, for the following reasons:
>
> * "Googling" OpenSG points to opensg.org that contains "News" about
> SIGGRAPH 2006(!) and points to a new Website that is unreachable for
> about 3 months now.
True. Actually, googling OpenSG gives you the Open Smart Grid page first right
now, but I'm assuming even new users realize that's the wrong page.
> * There's a source forge website http://sourceforge.net/projects/opensg
> also in the google results that contain 2 ratings, one of them just
> stating "dead". Considering that the "daily builds" you can fetch from
> that website are from July 2007, that's not very surprising.
I hadn't seen that one. That's not good, absolutely.
> * The last official release 1.8 in 2007. Tons of features have been
> added since then but nobody knows about them. OpenSG 2 will be released
> "really soon" for at least 2 years now. The well known other scene graph
> with the very similar name had 5 releases - in 2009 only. To quote Joel
> Spolsky here: "Real artists ship!"
That's the first time someone quotes Spolsky on me (and a recent one at that).
> * Without knowing the actual IP address, it's currently not even
> possible to checkout / update the the 2.0 source code repository.
True.
> * There are no ready to use builds for 2.0 all - although one gets used
> to compile OpenSG (doing this since the old 1.2 days), this is really
> annoying, takes lots of time and definitely keeps away users that want
> to give it a try.
True.
> Long story short, it's the same old rule: What good is an awesome
> product if there's nobody out there who buys/uses it?
>
> Please keep in mind that there are not only academic users out there who
> write what I usually call "fire and forget" research code but also
> companies (like ours) that chose OpenSG as a base for their commercial
> development. Getting employees into OpenSG is a major investment (mainly
> because of the still pretty poor documentation).
Sorry to hear that. I thought the Starter Guide is a pretty decent start,
although admittedly it does not go very deep. What's the main problem that you
see?
> This is/was a major platform (and thus business) decision and seeing
> OpenSG going down the drain really gives me the creeps.
Creeps are never good.
> So please...
>
> ... let the world know that OpenSG is still alive
> * update or shut down opensg.org
> * update or shut down the source forge project site
> * get opensg.vrsource.org back online
>
> ... feature fix and release. And release more often!
>
> ... document!
>
> .. announce new features (just discovering something like
> DeferredRenderingStage in the svn logs is not what I consider a new
> feature annoncement)
>
> If you need help (web space, web design, machines for daily builds,
> documentation, domain registrations...) let us (the community) know -
> I'm sure that there are more people out there willing to help. However,
> you (the core team) have to coordinate that.
It's actually somewhat worse than you describe. We also have a Google Code site
that has no code but just some Wiki pages, and there is now a couple of OpenSG
repos on github.
OpenSG is not dead at all, on the contrary, there is a lot of pretty cool stuff
going on (Deferred Shading is only the beginning, there is quite a lot more in
the wings). But you are right, unless you happen to stumble upon this mailing
list, you will not know.
So now, what do we do about it (emphasis on WE, meaning everybody reading this)?
Basic things:
If you think OpenSG is interesting and important, go to the SF page
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/opensg/) and recommend it. Right now. Takes 20
seconds.
Web sites: I already closed down the (unused) Trac and SVN on SourceForge. We
still have the 1.8 CVS on there, which I would like to shut down, but I know
that would cost me my head, so we'll leave that until everybody's migrated. I'm
in the process of migrating opensg.vrsource.org to a new site
(external.lite3d.com/opensg). It's not working quite yet (Trac plugins can be
pretty darn stubborn), but I'm optimistic to get it to a usable point in the
next few days. Once that's done we can redirect www.opensg.org there and the
web
should be back.
Release: That's a bigger problem. I've been reluctant to do a 2.0 release as it
is a one-time chance to break backwards compatibility, and I really, really
wanted to get it right. Unfortunately it's been taking so long that other
commitments, both private and professional, have eaten so deep into my schedule
that I don't have enough time to really work on it any more. Carsten took up a
lot of my slack, but he is more and more needed on the project that actually
pays for him that there is only so much he can do. Gerrit's situation is
similar. We're all using OpenSG in our projects, but the time to do the project
management part that goes beyond the code that we need for ourselves is
suffering. To keep OpenSG growing we will need some help from the community.
Are we ready to release yet? I don't know. We've come a long way, and many
things have changed massively and several times over the last two years. I
think
the fundamentals are pretty good right now, so that I'm not feeling too bad
about it. Which brings us to the next point:
Installers. We switched to cmake for the build system (after a long and painful
scons stint). As a consequence, all the old scripts that we had for 1 don't
really work any more. That is not as bad as it may sound, cmake does have a lot
better support for the things we're interested in than make, but it doesn't
work
automatically, and we don't have enough experience to just do it real quick.
Some help here would really be helpful (see below).
Dailybuilds: Due to see above the old scripts don't work any more. Again, CMake
helps with that. I will set up a CDash server to complement the OpenSG Trac.
That will give us a good environment to manage different automatic builds. I
have not been able to figure out how to use CDash to do dailybuild releases
like
we used to have (see below).
Documentation: The crux for each Open Source project, OpenSG being a good
example. I was hoping that Trac would make it easier to get community
involvement, but that hasn't quite worked out. We do have the Starter Guide on
Trac (1.8 and 2.0), which was supposed to be a kick start in getting proficient
with OpenSG. I know it's not very deep, but we were hoping to get some
user-contributed documentation here, which has not worked out very well at all.
The HowDoI's worked a little better, we at least got a few comments, but that
dried up quickly, too. I know writing documentation is the least fun part of
everybody's work (been there, many times), but that's also why it is hard for
us
to do it alone. So if you're new to OpenSG and just worked your way to
understanding some issue, spend the time to write about it on the Wiki. Even
something short can be useful.
Community: I have to admit that I'm a little disappointed with the community
overall. It's not a surprise that there is only a few people that really
actively contribute. I obviously do understand that OpenSG is far from being
easy to understand. We've done some things in 2 to hopefully make it easier to
use, and we do have examples on how to extend things, but we have gotten
surprisingly little contributions. Is that because nobody does extend it? Or
are
you just sitting on a ton of cool code? :)
But even for very simple things like my occasional 'What are you doing with
OpenSG?' polls we get almost no responses at all. We're happy to help wherever
we can, and I think our (i.e. Carsten's) responsiveness on the mailing list is
better than any other project I've seen, but only seeing the community from the
side that has problems is a pretty lop-sided view (and not a pretty one). We
would like to see the other side, too, the side that is happy jumping up and
down because something new and cool is working now. We see almost none of that,
and it's not exactly a great motivating factor for spending more time doing
things that don't benefit ourselves very much (like writing documentation)
rather than spending time with our families (yes, we do have those ;).
Community Call:
- CPack. If anybody knows CPack enough to set it up, please take a look at our
CMake system and see if you can add CPack support. Our CMake is not trivial,
due
to the many libraries and dependencies and example programs, and we definitely
need support for Linux, Windows and OSX, so a quick and dirty hack won't cut it.
- Dailybuilds. CDash is a start, but we need people to provide build servers
for
the different platforms. More importantly we need somebody with experience to
help us figure out how to do dailybuild releases in the CDash context.
- Documentation: if you have something to add the to the starter guide, or if
you can write an example program that shows an aspect of OpenSG that is not
covered by an existing example, send it to us.
- Advertisement: The Gallery is pretty nice, but not much is happening on it.
If
you have some new, cool pictures, put them up (once it's up again).
We'll be happy to coordinate things, so if there are things that you want to
contribute, be it time or code or data, let us know and we'll see how we can
make best use of it.
I'm sure I'm forgetting a lot of things (it's a little late right now), but I'm
hoping this can kick off some new energy.
Thanks for the wake-up call and let's see who else is waking up! :)
Yours
Dirk
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