minutes

Paul:

• Is sick.
• Bug fixes and small features for Miro Community.
• We have a lot of sites and things seem pretty stable.
• Working on Miro Community 0.9 now. 0.9 isn't very feature-full, but it improves on things for style, look and feel, and such.

Luc:

• Worked a couple of days on subtitle support for Miro on Windows using VLC. Building a test application in C. Once he's got that working, he'll transcribe it to Python and ctypes.
• Switched gears to help Will to fix libtorrent build problems with the new binary kit system. Bumped into problems getting it to compile on OSX 10.4 (expletive expletive expletive). Worked around it.

Will:

• Continued working on libtorrent and binary kit changes.
• Wants to do a 2.5.4 that includes vlc 1.0.3, libtorrent/unicode fixes on Windows, and database fixes from Ben.

Ben:

• Fixed database problems with duplicate ids.
• Spent time removing sorts.pyx and filetypes.pyx from the codebase. This reduces complexity of the build.
• Wants to push out a 2.5.4 with database fixes he's done recently.
• Wants to finish the fasttypes removal work on OSX.
• Talked about the sniffer code.

Janet:

• Tested changes in Miro and Miro Community.
• Working on making it easier to assign tasks to volunteers and get more volunteers involved in the process without losing track of them.
• Wrote up a wiki page for subtitle implementation work and testing. This will become the specification of what we're implementing now that we're mostly done research. https://develop.participatoryculture.org/trac/democracy/wiki/SubtitleImplementationDetails
• Is having her wisdom teeth taken out next week.

bugzilla

• 19 bugs/feature-requests created
• 1 bugs marked DUPLICATE
• 7 bugs marked FIXED
• 1 bugs marked WONTFIX
• 2 bugs marked INVALID

Miro uses libtorrent-rasterbar for bittorrent downloading. We had a copy of the libtorrent source code in the portable section of our repository. Miro would compile libtorrent as a Python extension along with all the other stuff to build Miro binaries. Not any more.

Luc is almost done carrying my changes over to OSX 10.4, but as of today, libtorrent-rasterbar is no longer in the portable section of our repository.

What does this mean?

For Windows, a clean build on our Windows build box went from taking enough time for me to make dinner, eat dinner, and then completely forget what I was working on (26 minutes) to 4 minutes. In my Windows XP vm, a clean build went from 8 minutes to 1 minute. Plus I fixed the unicode problems Miro had with Windows and libtorrent and updated Miro to use libtorrent 0.14.6 on Windows.

For OSX, a clean build on my mac mini running OSX 10.5.8 went from 17 minutes to 1 minute. Plus I updated Miro to use libtorrent 0.14.6 on OSX, too.

For gtk-x11, libtorrent is now a required system package. Miro will no longer compile its own libtorrent if you don't already have it installed. I'm pretty sure that most modern versions of the major Linux distributions have packages for libtorrent-rasterbar and the Python bindings.

We have a couple of other changes that affect the project structure almost done. I'll blog about them as they finish landing.

11/4/2009 - This is completed now. Many thanks to Luc who sorted out the issues I was running into with compiling libtorrent on OSX 10.4 with Boost 1.35.0.

minutes

Paul:

• Worked on Miro Community stuff over the week.
• Talked about infrastructure for the MC services.

Janet:

• 2.5.3 looks like a pretty good release.
• Tested Will's torrent-related fixes--looks good.
• Testing Luc's subtitle work. Found some bugs with the subtitle code and older versions of OSX. Otherwise, it's looking good so far.
• Talked a bit about Miro Community testing. We have a few volunteers helping, but there's still work to do.

Luc:

• Worked on subtitle stuff. Happy to see people are starting to test subtitle-enabled builds.
• Worked out some bugs so it now works on 10.4, 10.5, and 10.6.
• Working on getting subtitles working on Miro on Windows with VLC.
• This is coming along nicely and we decided it should land in Miro 2.6 so we're going to move the work to the master branch.

Will:

• Reworked Miro on Windows to use a packaged binary kit.
• Switched Miro on Windows to use a pre-built libtorrent from the binary kit.
• Planning to do the same for Miro on OSX.
• Pushed out a set of Karmic packages for 2.5.3, but they aren't well tested.

Ben:

• Did some bug-fixing.

bugzilla

• 23 bugs/feature-requests created
• 12 bugs marked WORKSFORME
• 1 bugs marked INVALID
• 2 bugs marked DUPLICATE
• 3 bugs marked WONTFIX
• 3 bugs marked FIXED
• 25 bugs marked INCOMPLETE

I just pushed out packages for Karmic for Miro 2.5.3. Until Karmic is out, consider these packages beta quality. If you use these packages and run into problems, let us know as soon as you can.

Ubuntu installation instructions

minutes

Nick and Luc weren't on the call. Janet and Will had colds. Ben's side of the call had some weird 15 second delay. That made it a dicey call that we ended on IRC.

Minutes for this morning's call:

Paul:

• Working on Miro Community finishing up version 0.8.

Ben:

• Worked on a lot of bugs, especially 12101. Checked in a few fixes into master which look pretty good, but need testing.
• Worked on a bunch of other bugs.
• Worked on 12229 to allow for distribution of RSS and content on a DVD.

Will:

• Worked on extracting binary kit stuff from the repository.
• Planning to work on Karmic packages for 2.5.3.

Janet:

• Sick.
• Hoping to get to testing the changes Ben made for 12101.
• Spent some time testing Miro Community and is getting geared up to start testing Luc's subtitle code.

bugzilla

• 14 bugs created
• 2 bugs marked FIXED
• 1 bug marked DUPLICATE
• 1 bug marked INVALID

The Miro 2.5 series has been a total pain in the ass--I'm not going to lie. Not only has it infuriated a number of users, but it's been like a Sysaphusian struggle for the team.

Right now there are 3 developers (Ben, Luc and myself) and 1 QA person (Janet) that work on Miro fulltime. Then we have a large community of testers, translators, and a handful of people who send in patches to fix the problems that irk them most. Even with this large community, the majority of the development, testing and support is done by 4 people.

In the last three months, Janet's house was hit by lightning frying a bunch of her testing machines; I bought a house and moved (along with the build boxes); Ben went on vacation for a month; Luc bought an apartment, moved, and then had his Internet connection totally hosed for a month; I had unforeseen medical problems (that I don't really want to talk about), that resulted in me being offline for the last two weeks; and our ssl certificates expired.

This week is the first time since the beginning of August when we've had all 4 of us working.

We've been trying so hard to get a much-needed 2.5.3 release out. It has a slew of fixes that should alleviate an array of problems that users have been experiencing. We're finally on the verge of the release. I hope it'll happen today or tomorrow.

I really appreciate the patience many of you have had with us as we scrambled to do the impossible over the last couple of months. I really wish it could have happened differently, but it's as if the forces of nature were completely against us.

Though 2.5.3 should fix a variety of issues, we're working on re-architecting some portions of Miro that aren't working well with the database changes we made in Miro 2.5. On top of that, we're working on subtitle support, extensions, and continuing to make Miro a better experience for a larger group of people. Some/most/all of this will show up in Miro 2.6 and 2.7, hopefully in the next few months.

note

I wasn't on the call for 10/7/2009, so I don't have notes for that day.

minutes

Will:

• Planning to push 2.5.3 out.
• Planning to keep working on extracting binary kit stuff.
• Then get miro working on Karmic Koala.
• Then moving libtorrent out of portable.
• Will be in Providence, RI from October 23rd through 26th.

Luc:

• Continuing work on subtitle work.
• Perian doesn't support subtitles in subfolders. Luc is looking into fixing Perian and then sending a patch upstream.
• Luc is going to start looking into VLC support next.

Ben:

• Planning to work on 12101. One of the theories is that when torrents are downloading, Miro is doing a lot of disk thrashing.
• Remove torrent metadata from the updates.
• Tweak status so that we only persist to disk every now and then.
• Plans to work on bug 12229.
• It's difficult to figure out how many people are affected by 12101.

Paul:

• Working on Miro Community 0.8 release. It's coming along nicely.

Janet:

• Tested Miro Community and Miro 2.5 branch builds.
• Working on testing plans for Miro Community post 0.8 release.

2.5.3 status:

• Talked about 12277 and 12276 and where we're going with that plan.
• Hopefully we'll get it out today or tomorrow.

bugzilla

• 8 bugs created
• 1 bug marked DUPLICATE
• 4 bugs marked FIXED
• 2 bugs marked WORKSFORME
• 1 bug marked WONTFIX

minutes

Minutes for this morning's call:

Janet:

• Has gone through all of the tests on Windows XP for 2.5.3 rc1.
• Working on testing Miro on OSX.
• 2.5.3 rc1 is looking good so far.

Luc:

• Worked on 12212 and should have it fixed tomorrow.
• Worked on subtitle ui--it's coming along nicely.
• It's hard to determine which subtitle thing is which language which makes it hard to allow users to choose a default subtitle language.
• Worked on external .srt subtitle handling.
• Perian doesn't support external .srt for movie containers it doesn't open by itself (mp4, quicktime, ogg, ...). Luc's running into problems with that and is trying to talk to the Perian developers.
• VLC handles everything created so far just fine. Luc's tossing around ditching Quicktime/Perian for VLC. (ed note: I think I summarized that right--but I could be completely mistaken about what Luc is tossing around.)
• Will continue doing subtitle work in a subtitle branch that'll eventually get pushed to g.p.o.

Ben:

• Hopped on the call to say hi.

Will:

• Worked on 2.5.3 bugs, put out a rc1 release.
• Working on redoing release process, scripts and infrastructure to make releases easier and cleaner with git.

Paul:

• Working on Miro Community--almost done with version 1.0.
• Working on unit tests.

kickstarter

We achieved the $1000 goal in large part to a couple of key donations. Thank you!

bugzilla

• 21 bugs created
• 7 bugs marked FIXED
• 1 bug marked DUPLICATE
• 8 bugs marked INCOMPLETE
• 2 bugs marked INVALID
• 1 bug marked WONTFIX

minutes

Minutes for this morning's call:

Luc:

• Working on fixing problems with 10.6 build environment and getting Miro working on 10.6.
• Working on subtitles. (Please help us fund this!)
• Having issues with .srt files rendering with Perian and 10.6.
• Snow Leopard support is targeted for 2.5.3.
• Talked about subtitle implementation specifics.

Will:

• Working on trying to get 2.5.3 out.
• Working on 12101.

Janet:

• Testing fixes targeted for 2.5.3.
• Working on Miro Community testing. Planning testing and manual testing.
• Suggested we build a pre-rollout/pre-demo checkoff list for testing.

Paul:

• Worked on Miro Community and it's almost at the 1.0 point.
• Miro Community still needs polish, documentation, testing plans...
• Two sites are live now.
• There are a bunch of sites on deck.

kickstarter

Subtitles project on kickstarter has 24 backers for $494. We're hoping it clears $1000 by the end of the month--8 days to go.

bugzilla

• 19 bugs created
• 4 bugs marked FIXED
• 3 bugs marked DUPLICATE
• 1 bug marked WONTFIX
• 2 bugs marked WORKSFORME

summary

Every Wednesday morning we have a conference call that we call the "dev call". This has been happening for years. Mostly we use it as a place to schedule upcoming development, talk with each other about problems we're working on, and come up to speed on where we're all at.

I occasionally take minutes when someone isn't on the dev call. I'm experimenting with posting the minutes on this blog for the next month. If it turns out to be useful, I'll keep doing it. Otherwise I'll stop.

minutes

Minutes for this morning's call:

Luc:

• working on getting Miro working with Snow Leopard.
• cleaning up the sandbox code.
• it'll make things much easier when we drop support for 10.4--but that's far in the future still. (15% of OSX users are using 10.4 according to Miro Guide stats.)
• then we talked about the costs of supporting 10.4 users.

Will:

• worked on Miro 2.5.3 and 2.6 all week.
• talked about bug status for 12028, 12150, 12166, 12101, and 12108.
• talked about how we're building libtorrent and how we should bump it to the binary kit which will definitely alleviate some issues and possibly alleviate others because we're not really building it "right" in the first place.
• made changes to Planet Miro and took over curating.

Janet:

• got her machine back which was fried by lightning in August.
• working through reworking her test environments.
• testing the Miro 2.5 nightly that Will built.

Paul:

• working on Miro Community.
• almost done with merging "users" and "authors". should get resolved in the near future.
• continuing to implement styling stuff from Morgan.

kickstarter

Subtitles project on kickstarter has 12 backers for $191. We're hoping it clears $1000 by the end of the month.

bugzilla

Rough Bugzilla stats:

• 16 bugs created
• 8 bugs marked FIXED
• 4 bugs marked as DUPLICATE