Some ideas for the aRts-replacement

[Scott Wheeler]

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On Saturday 21 February 2004 10:46, Marco Lohse wrote:

> you are right, we didn't handle that very good in the past: all stuff in 
> the examples/ subdir is mainly for quickly testing new plug-ins, etc. 
> Unfortunately, we then often "forget" about the one or the other 
> example, and, well, things just break.
> 
> Now we have this application called 'clic' that lets you setup 
> (distributed) flow graphs from a text file and most of the example are 
> obsolete by now and will be removed and replaced by small text files in 
> the next release.
> 
> So, if anyone of you wants to play around with NMM: please, use clic 
> first (see 
> http://graphics.cs.uni-sb.de/NMM/dist-0.4.1/Docs/clic/index.html )


> For project goals we already set up a wiki. I am afraid, I really cannot 
> tell you whether NMM is good for your needs. You have to decide that by 
> yourselves. All I can do is to invite you to have a look at it. The 
> other thing is that I can tell you what NMM currently already can do. 
> And we can answer your questions, you just have to ask.

Well, I should put that another way -- would it be considered a priority with 
the NMM developers to make it fit to KDE's needs if we can communicate the 
things that we need?  Of course in the end the KDE folks will have to make a 
decision, but I think it's important to establish whether KDE's goals for a 
tool line up with the people that are maintaining it.  For example with aRts 
this was not the case and the source of some of our problems.

Sidenote -- and somewhat related -- what the binary compatibility policy for 
NMM?
 
> You are right, currently NMM is mainly a University project. But a lot 
> of people already told us that they have started to develop for NMM.

Is there a desire for it to break away from being purely a Uni project and to 
become something that's developed in a more distributed, standard OSS way?

The situation that I'm worried about is the possibility of KDE relying on NMM 
but not being able to be "in the loop" since we obviously all can't move to 
Saarbrueken.  :-)
 
> NMM is *not* mostly maintained by me. Michael is also working at the 
> University within the NMM project. Among many other things, he is 
> currently in charge for all the releases.

Ok -- like I said -- that was just the impression I got after a short while of 
looking over the information.

> And most important: There are  
> a lot of motivated students working in the project. You might be right, 
> students mainly work within the NMM project to do a Master or Bachelor 
> thesis. How much they want to contribute to other things really depends 
> on what the student wants. I think this worked really good so far: we 
> have always some students leaving the project, other students start to 
> develop things for NMM. That is pretty much the same in other "pure" 
> Open Source projects.

Yes -- but it's a problem in "pure" OSS projects too.  :-)  Again, just trying 
to learn from past mistakes -- how many people would you say are "core" 
developers?  i.e. guys that could take over maintainership and manage the 
project if they needed to...

> That is maybe one of the myths of NMM: "the lack of "real" applications"
> 
> Just take a look at the Multimedia-Box: 
> http://graphics.cs.uni-sb.de/NMM/Status/MMBox/index.html
> it is TV, a DVD player, a CD player, a grabber, a distributed 
> transcoder, a general player with play-list,..., all within one big 
> application that allows multi-tasking.

Well that's a real application (singular).  :-)

> well, we do have a cvs list for sourceforge, we do have a forum, we do 
> have wiki pages, things just get started...
> 
> All the other things like IRC, etc. : well, I think, if people will need 
> these things, someone will just simply start it. Currently I do not see 
> a reason to use IRC to talk to the guy who sits next to me all day ;) 
> but I could use it if someone wants to talk to me that way.

Well, again -- but that's really what was behind a lot of my questions -- KDE 
using NMM would essentially force a change in the NMM community and the way 
that the software is developed.  Is that something that NMM considers exiting 
or annoying?

- -Scott

- -- 
Three words: you have no clue
- -Slashdot
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