[jokosher-devel] Jokosher 0.10 roadmap meeting

["Laszlo Pandy" <laszlok2 gmail com>]

Originally we were aiming to have steady predictable releases that would
come out just in time to make it into each Ubuntu release. However it has
been almost 1 year since our last release. There wasn't much point in
releasing if hardly any code has changed.

However in the last few months there are been a few crashes reported and
more duplicates from hardy users wanting to try out Jokosher. Most of these
crashes have been fixed. In particular the MP3 crashing bug doesn't crash
anymore but instead prints out an error and refuses to play, however I am
confident that we can get this issue with id3demux fixed in Gstreamer
soon enough.

So on to the exciting part. Our next release will be version 0.10, and will be
released _before_ August 28th, so that it can make it in before the Ubuntu
Intrepid feature freeze. Yes, we realize that incrementing 0.9 should result in
1.0, and calling this release 0.10 is a total cop out. If you are really that
concerned about it, you have my permission to refer to the next release of
Jokosher as 1.0pre_alpha_preview_1.

Also this sunday, may 4th we will be having a meeting in #jokosher on
irc.freenode.net at 18:00 UTC. That means 8pm in Europe, 7pm in England,
2pm in Ottawa, and noon in Costa Rica.

This meeting will be mostly feature discussion. If you cannot attend the
meeting feel free to put your ideas on the mailing list before sunday and
we will discuss it then. Also we will be having another meeting at the same
time in another few weeks.

The two ideas that I am proposing (and offering to implement) are:
a) fixing up the accurate waveform patch I worked on with pecisk. It will make
    the waveform perfectly match the audio, allow more detailed zooming,
    and hopefully use less memory and take less time to save project files.
b) integrating a python script I wrote which takes a few minutes to test all the
    sample rates that your sound card supports. Hopefully this will solve some
    recording bugs once people are recording at a proper rate.

Finally, there is one feature which has already been started and is available in
SVN. This feature is project templates, which allows you to select a template
when a new project is created and Jokosher will automatically add all the
instruments for that type of project. Currently is it very limited and
not terribly
easy for the user to figure out. But since it is already in SVN I
don't want to have
to disable it at release time.

I am hoping that someone can step up and take responsibility for this feature so
it can be very useful in the next release. I don't mean someone to
just code it to
completion (but that would be helpful too), but rather someone to make decisions
about the how the user will create and use a project template, and can remember
where all the rough edges are so we can test for them before we release.

Those are my three ideas. We have 3.5 months to do anything we want as long as
someone is willing to put in the time for it. Lets hear your ideas!

Thanks, see everyone on sunday!
Laszlo