There’s been a long pause since our last developer news report, but this can better be attributed to less willingness to write these notes rather than lack of project activity.
FrOSCon is rapidly beginning to establish itself as the occasion for the Lumiera annual project get-together. The project has been represented at the conference in one or other form over the past several years, so if you’d like to get together and meet the various individuals involved in the project, you might consider attending the conference next year. Originally, we intended to meet up for a couple of days before the conference in Southern Germany, but this fell through for one organisational reason or another. It would be great if we managed to get together a few days before (or after) FrOSCon 2013.
The Lumiera Project was at the conference this year with a Developer Room. Hermann (aka Ichthyo) held a talk on Git, followed by a discussion on Git on the Saturday and Sunday of the conference.
The conference also proved productive for Lumiera as Hermann and Benny (aka Benn)
began reviewing the content of various Lumiera web pages. Many of the pages
are not finished and have been in a state of work-in-progress for some time
now. Other pages were found to be lacking in content. At the conference they
both sat down and been tackling this problem. Moreover, it was quickly realised that
Asciidoc did not have proficient tools to handle crosslinking. Moreover,
Lumiera has an abundance of technical jargon and terminology with a very
specialised meaning. A good glossary is almost a must. A
glossary is also a
good place for developers to explain various new aspects in Lumiera over
traditional thinking: “this what Lumiera understands of this term”. It was
thus agreed to automate the generation of a glossary among the documentation.
This work is now in full progress.
Ichthyo has continued the work on the player subsystem and related parts at the connection down to the engine, where the continuous playback, stepping and shuffling operations need to be translated into time-bound calculation tasks. The code base has increased considerably since our last news report, however, there is still limited changes visible to the user. As time permits, M. Fisher has now been contributing to the GUI for just over a year. He ported some parts to a never library version and investigated a possible transition to GTK-3. After an absence of some time caused by other work commitments, Christian (cehteh) has also returned to the project and reworked our automated build server (“builddrone”)
Lumiera is still plagued by the lack of developers. In the Spring of this year, Lumiera had a pro bono advertisement in the Libre Graphics Magazine, an Open Source magazine devoted to Open Source Graphics. The advertisement, placed on page 45 of Issue-1.4, → pdf low res (19MB) high res (456MB) was generally geared towards a call for developers. The problem of too few developers working on Lumiera is still a serious concern for the project.