Some ideas for the aRts-replacement

[Marco Lohse]

Scott Wheeler wrote:
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> On Saturday 21 February 2004 10:46, Marco Lohse wrote:
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> 
[..]

> 
> 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.
> 

As far as I understood, you should be able to use NMM for your 
requirements without major design changes (but maybe I do not understand 
what exactly your requirements are ... or, there are different opinions 
on this list about this issue ;)

If this is true, I am sure that other things can get fixed, either by 
you, by us or by someone "in between" KDE/NMM.

For us, it would be good to know, what exactly "fit to KDE's needs" 
would mean, and what the KDE needs are.

> Sidenote -- and somewhat related -- what the binary compatibility policy for 
> NMM?
>  

so far, there was no need for any policy. But of course it should be 
possible for NMM to assure binary compatibility between different minor 
versions. As we are using interfaces for controlling multimedia 
components, this should be even easier. (notice, this does not mean that 
every piece of code you want to develop, needs to run through the NMM 
IDL compiler, just take a look at the interfaces we have, they are 
mainly for controlling multimedia devices/plug-ins.)

> 
>>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.  :-)
>  
>

well, Saarbrücken is really a nice place ;)

but seriously: I personally think these things just have to happen by 
themselves. If someone starts to discuss things with us, sends in 
patches, develops things, etc., then it will become more "distributed, 
standard".

[..]
> 
>>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...
> 

hmm, depends on how many people (e.g. students) are working on the 
project. During the last years that was something like 3-8 people. But 
again: this does not mean, that all these people will work for "the 
KDE-multimedia-thing". The will mainly work on NMM/the Multimedia-Box. 
Of course, we could definitely do things in between...

[..]
> 
>>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
> 

I think that we would really like to see NMM to be used in other 
projects. We would definitely like to see KDE use it. On the other hand, 
we still not to do our research with it.

Have fun, Marco.