Re: [fluid-dev] Tickets, project status, and 1.1.0

[David Henningsson]

address@hidden skrev:
> Quoting David Henningsson <address@hidden>:
>> address@hidden skrev:
>> Perhaps you could send me your code as a svn diff and we could work on
>> it that way until it is ready for checkin - which doesn't have to mean
>> that everything has to be completed, just that things aren't much more
>> broken than they are currently.
> 
> Let me put a little more work into the current changes, so it builds and
> works for the most part.  Then I'll send it your way.  I'll try and do
> this in the next few days.

Works for me. Of course I'm not made of time either, but I think I can
spare some every now and then :-)

>> I'm personally neither for nor against glib, so I don't mind whether we
>> depend on it or not. But if we borrow code from glib I suggest we put it
>> in a separate directory. At the same time, we should review fluid_list /
>> fluid_hash and change it to newly updated glib code.
> 
> Sounds good.

Yep, until we're looking for volunteers and everybody looks down at the
floor ;-)

>>> Sponsorship would be an interesting thing to look into.  Setting up
>>> paypal donations could also be good or having a bounty system (users
>>> pledge an amount for a certain task).  I have not yet seriously
>>> attempted making money at working on free software, though it has
>>> consumed much of my time in the past 10 years.  The need to make an
>>> income definitely affects how much time I have available for free
>>> software projects though, so receiving money for working on FluidSynth
>>> would definitely give me more time to work on it.

We also have Google Summer Of Code, but I'm not sure that FluidSynth is
big enough to attract their attention. (And we need a student as well, btw.)

>> Seems like you just got your first $25 then :-)
> 
> Indeed!  It reminds me of how little effort I've put into making money
> on free software.  For some reason it has always been more difficult for
> me to justify getting paid to work on free software, versus "real
> work".  Seems like an ideal situation though!

<philosophical guru>

People make software for free because it warms the heart (giving back to
the community that has given him/her good software), and for fun. But
not everyone can work on the fun parts, or GNOME would have hundreds of
3D screensavers (oh wait, bad example ;-) ).

But for the boring work that nobody wants to do for free, adding money
as a compensation seems like a good idea to me. And, it does speed up
the rate of which things are being done, which is also important.

</philosophical guru>

>> Anyway, Ubuntu Karmic is already past DebianImportFreeze, so I think it
>> is better to make sure we get a good 1.1.0 into Karmic+1. This means a
>> deadline for 1.1.0 no later than november 2009. Does this seem okay to
>> you?
> 
> Sure, that sounds like a good deadline.

Of course, if we're finished in september, that would be even better.
FluidSynth are distributed to many more places than just Ubuntu.

>>>> - Half of ticket #24, will require some kind of "soft-stop" feature in
>>>> the audio drivers. Problems: I can fix alsa and probably also jack
>>>> drivers, but I don't have a clue about how to fix the rest of them.
>>>>
>>>> Any thoughts?
>>>
>>> It seems like if the player stops and all voices have stopped, that
>>> means nothing else will sound, except for remaining reverb/chorus
>>> effect.  I've been thinking it would be nice to have some API for
>>> checking the current number of active voices.  This could also be used
>>> for the logic which determines when a song has ended.  Perhaps some sort
>>> of callback could be triggered when the song ends?
>>
>> You're talking about the other half of the ticket, I'm talking about
>> fixing the audio driver part. For ALSA the problem is that we never call
>> snd_pcm_drain.
>>
> Perhaps I didn't understand that half of it then.  So this is related to
> not flushing all the audio from the audio driver's perspective.  Should
> this be done in the close() method?

To not get too much off-topic I'll continue this part as a comment to
ticket #24: http://fluidsynth.resonance.org/trac/ticket/24

>> Great! Could you also change the tickets that are assigned to you (i e
>> jgreen/assigned) to something else (e g unassigned/new) to indicate
>> you're not working on them?
> 
> Done.  I now have 2 tickets :)  

Eases the burden somewhat, huh? :-)

// David