Hi all,
I'm really glad to see Dominik's e-mail inspired some reaction :-)
On 13/01/2010, at 06:43, Dirk Reiners wrote:
> 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.
I'd say a rock-solid website on a stable, straightforward domain such as
opensg.org is the most fundamental thing we need right now. And I would
recommend against redirecting to another domain. A VHost would be much better.
It causes less confusion and improves results on search engines. Website
hosting is very cheap, there's no excuse for not having an excellent website
infrastructure nowadays. If you need help, please let me know.
> 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.
Well, we have always wanted to help ;-)
To cultivate a community, I guess one needs 1) an interesting project; and 2)
some decent infrastructure to facilitate communication and contributions. It
seems to me you have always had the first, but have been lacking of the second.
Of course, it's very hard to grow a community without the second.
Yes, it takes some time from the core developers to set up the infrastructure
and do some of the maintenance tasks. But I know you can trust several of the
community members in this mailing list to help. Please delegate some tasks to
them. Delegation is key.
> 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:
I see no good reason why 2.0 shouldn't be freezed, tested and released ASAP.
You can always break backwards compatibility in 2.1. The "other scene graph
with similar name" used to break backwards compatibility all the time. No big
deal, if it is for a good reason.
> 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).
It's easy to get most things done with CMake. You already have an automatic
package generation system ("make package" -- we use it). The only difficulty
I've had so far is understanding OpenSG's peculiar multi-pass compilation
system. A wiki page explaining how it works, and especially, how to contribute
a "Contrib" plugin would be extremely useful.
> 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).
Sorry, I couldn't figure out CDash either. We use Hudson here, but CDash is
probably a better option for OpenSG, once you get it to work...
> 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.
We can try to help, but there are kinds of documentation that can only be
written by a skillful core developer. Maybe you should focus on that kind of
documentation (on Doxygen) and let the community work on tutorials and HowTos.
> 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? :)
I guess we hadn't worked on anything worth contributing until this point. Our
first contribution is on the way, though. We should have a working FBX reader
by the end of the month (good for integration with Google SketchUp and Autodesk
products).
> 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.
AFAIK you got it working already ("make package" works). If you need help with
the Windows installer part (CPack's integration with NSIS, which is trivial to
integrate with daily builds) I could do it. Since I'm on OSX, I could also work
on the MacOS framework/bundle generator, though I don't have a lot of
experience with that (i.e. only if no one else with more experience volunteers).
> - 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.
We can provide some build servers. In fact, we have OpenSG running in our own
(Hudson-based) continuous integration system, here. Integrating with your CDash
server shouldn't be a problem.
> - 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).
OK, once you get the website back in shape I will ask for authorization to
publish some screenshots of our project. It may not be beautiful, but I guess
it's something :-)
> 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.
GREAT!!!
Cheers,
Thiago
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