On 2010-01-13 09:43, Dirk Reiners wrote: [... alot ... :) ]
Great post! I sincerely hope something good will come out of this. We will likely do more OpenSG-related work this year than we did last autumn. (It's been a lot of web, GUI, networking and motor control) I'll fill in below where I feel I have something to contribute at the moment. I might be back later. :) > 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. How about migrating the 1.8 CVS to a git-repo, so that it's still avaialble for stragglers? I can probably run a git->cvs conversion myself, store it on github (I think I have enough space) and post a link on the trac-wiki. > 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. Release! Then we have something to test, build, dist, report bugs against, etc. How about naming it "OpenSG2 0.1" (or something) to indicate that this is a different best that's not a total superset of 1.8? > 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. ? .. I haven't seen many of those. There are calls for academia papers and similar things, but those don't really apply to us company guys. Anyway, we're working on, amongst other things, a non-virtual operation room for team training: http://orzone.com/orcamp.html (And we use OpenSG to show some 3D here and there. There are greater plans in store for helping surgeons do the right thing, were more of OpenSG's network tech kicks in.) > 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 ;). Jumping up and down is easier if we have something concrete to be excited about, i.e. a release. :) Also, if you feel the need but don't have the time, let us know (via email + wiki) how to pick up that work. It's free open source, so no-one should break their back for nothing. You guys seem to spend a lot of your OpenSG-time coding, and that leaves little brain-power for other things. Perhaps some focus shift towards improving community support would help to let others in? A todo-list of things that needs doing helps, as well as supporting a better VCS that allows people to contribute more directly. > - 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. This is not as important for us, as we always build my own OpenSG (to match our boost/qt/vtk builds). It might be for one-off projects etc etc, but for real long-lived projects, you need more control over build-options. > - 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. FWIW, I do some BuildBot-hacking and could probably try to manage a buildmaster that to run the dailybuilds, if that is up for grabs. No clue about CDash's usefulness (and even less how to set it up), but do we need more than the BuildBot listing # of failures per build and slave (i.e. os / config)? The most important thing, IMO, is that we have on-line build slaves, that are running builds and tests, and that the colour is green. Cheers, /Marcus ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Verizon Developer Community Take advantage of Verizon's best-in-class app development support A streamlined, 14 day to market process makes app distribution fast and easy Join now and get one step closer to millions of Verizon customers http://p.sf.net/sfu/verizon-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Opensg-users mailing list Opensg-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/opensg-users
