Lumiera
The new emerging NLE for GNU/Linux

Participants

  • cehteh

  • joelholdsworth

  • ichthyo

  • raffa

  • Wes``Lappy

  • gmerlin

Boilerplate

Organization of this meeting

  • cehteh writes the protocol

Webpage-Infrastructure, Maintenance

Cehteh put this on topic because it’s really urgent to bring up some infrastructure to manage the information we produce.

The Lumiera pages on pipapo.org were always meant as intermediary solution. Pipapo.org gets much spam on the moinmoin wiki and cehteh expresses that he wants to move pipapo.org to a new infrastructure based on asciidoc and git he created (see http://git.pipapo.org/uWiki.html). This system is barely useable and needs lots of work to be completed. It would be nice to use it for Lumiera too, if the others agree. Maintaining and extending (scripting) needs someone who knows shell scripting and doesn’t need to be done by the core devs freeing their resources to work on Lumiera. Cehteh expresses that none of the people who proposed to help before showed up yet. WesLappy tells he might help (addendum not this week, because he is busy).

Next there was a suggestion by cehteh to convert the tiddlywikis to asciidoc. Ichthyo expresses that he likes the tiddlywikis, Joel mentions that they feel a little odd. Generally we all agree that they have some problems in sense of workflow and merging.

Ichthyo makes the suggestion to keep the tiddlywikis as scrapbook and build up 'official' documentation based on their content in whatever-we-use-then (asciidoc) documentation system. All agree on this approach.

Back to the new wiki, cehteh suggests to make stricter access rules to prevent spam: "There will be a group of 'Validated' people which following rules: only Validated people can edit general content and 'Validated' people can add new people to 'Validated' themselves". That means that we can have a lightweight self-administrating authentication where new people have to be introduced by someone who is already there.

Ichthyo suggests to send a reply to Serge G. who send an introduction to the cinelerra mailing list expressing that he would like to help.

Raffa will take care of content/design as much her time/knowledge permits.

Conclusion

  • We really need someone to help with the webpage scripting.

  • Documentation needs to be well organized and moved over.

  • Content of the pipapo.org moinmoin wiki should be moved over.

  • The new website should be well organized with a nice looking frontpage

  • All other documentation should be below that

Whats pending in DesignProcess

MistakestoAvoid

rick_777 wrote a "MistakestoAvoid" page which explains some possible gotchas. We basically agree with most points there while we already decided to address some things differently than he suggested. One noteable difference is that we do not intent to provide a windows version of Lumiera, which was explained in serveral places. Cehteh added some comments to the page explaining some things.

nothing more to discuss in 'Ideas', we go over to 'Drafts'

ArchitectureOverview

Cehteh suggests to put that drawing under version control, as .fig. Ichthyo explains that it is already a .SVG and that he does not like .fig.

Conclusion: We agree to keep it as .SVG, add it to the repository and improve/complete it.

GitSubmoduleTransistion

Another suggestion made by cehteh is to make managing of subprojects within the sourcetree easier. Joel and ichthyo oppose that it is not really needed now and needs more understanding of git. Ichthyo suggests that the documentation might be separated into its own git, he further explains that the things are not settled yet and we don’t know if we will some rearrangements and movements of files between modules.

Conclusion: We transform the documentation to a submodule and see how it works. Other things will be decided much later.

GlobalInitialization

This topic is discussed and agreed on the DesignProcess page already.

Conclusion: finalize it

MasterRepositorySetup

Setting up an master repository was decided on the last meeting. cehteh now set one up which also does some automatic, but intended fragile merging from subsystem maintainer branches. 1. it updates automatically for the maintainers repo for conflict free fast-forwards 2. it can always be overridden with explicit pushes

The others agree on the setup.

Ichthyo stresses that maintainers shall watch that their 'master' branch should compile cleanly and pass the testsuite always, test which are not operational should be tagged as PLANNED. We all agree, while cehteh’s master is currently in a broken state (note: fixed now).

Then a short discussion about building and synchronizing the docs follows. Problem is that docs build in maintainer branches are different for each branch, rsyncing them up to the server will always change a lot of things. We agree that the 'official' docs shall be build from the LUMIERA/master repository, preferably on the 'devel' vserver which has to be set up.

Conclusions: Make this final, setup build environment in the devel server and build docs there.

NoBugFlags

Defining a debugging control hierarchy. This is work in progress and cehteh explains that he works it out and deploys it, this depends on the GlobalInitialization decided earlier.

Conclusion: accepted, finish and finalize it.

Further Technical Discussion

Ichthyo asks how the GUI will be pulled up. Since he didn’t attend IRC discussions recently he has no information yet whats going on. We explain him that we already made some discussions. Integrate the GUI into the build system probably linked as library, nothing finally decided yet. Communication will go over the plugin/interface facility (Plain C API). This things should be worked out and documented in DesignProcess.

Cehteh made a small tool ./admin/headercheck which will gradually extended to proof that headers are sufficiently selfstanding.

Progress

Cehteh finished low level file handling and working in mmaping and frameprovider next. When thats finished, the finalization of the Plugin loader and interface definition things is the most urgent thing.

Ichthyo works on the builder internals and next on some sort of "connection manager".

Joel goes on with GUI programming and integrating it into the source tree next.

Gmerlin and cehteh discuss about how to handle the index files which avdecoder uses internally. cehteh would like to manage them in the Lumiera backend to, because filehandles are a precious resource. Gmerlin explains that this index files are just loaded and kept in memory. So this poses no problem for filehandle exhaustion. We will discuss this further via email.

Cehteh suggests that we should think about some kind of preferences/registry sometime next to store default configs.

Following a discussion about how messages are passed between GUI and core. Generally we will use the interfaces defined by the plugin system. Gmerlin says that he uses message queues in 'gmerlin', Joel requests that a lot of things should be done synchronous and he wants to avoid message queues. Cehteh suggests to use use the scheduler for GUI things too. For the parts where the GUI interacts with the high level proc model ichthyo and joel agree on working something (synchronous) out. Ichthyo stresses that the edit core is not threadsafe by design and relies on the backends scheduler. The underlying builder might sometimes to expensive for synchronous calls (ichthyo plans a rule system there) this needs to be worked out.

Ichthyo explains that the builder needs to detect cycles and check if the high level model is translateable into the low level model (in case plugins git removed and so on). Parts in the render graph which are not 'doable' should be flagged as erroneous but not dropped since one doesn’t want to loose project information when loading a project on a machine with different installed plugins. In any case it should be possible that the GUI gets immediate synchronous feedback for such things.

Next Meeting

Next meeting is on 5th June 21:00 UTC