[Fedora-music-list] ardour 2.4 was out

[Fernando Lopez-Lezcano]

On Tue, 2008-04-08 at 18:21 -0400, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:
> On Wed, 9 Apr 2008, Nicholas Manojlovic wrote:
> 
> > Packaging conventions and rules, I guess.
> >
> > I like the idea of the Fedora music sig a lot, but it seems to be in a
> > half-half state. I realise I'm being ridiculously critical here, because I
> > haven't contributed. But it feels like it took the best things from CCRMA
> > and made them more 'generic' and not as specialised. I may be wrong.
> 
> Maybe this is a fair point.
> 
> Really, I first envisioned this as a way to help bring CCRMA and Fedora 
> together.  Because the fact is, most of the CCRMA stuff should live in 
> Fedora anyway.  But the fact that CCRMA requires the RT kernel and other 
> non-standard stuff may make that difficult.

I don't think it is the kernel itself. After all I think all apps will
work fine on a stock Fedora kernel. They will not be able to run
reliably at low latencies but they will run. The "problem" (if there is
any) is a combination of many other factors. 

> The real question, to me, is what about CCRMA makes it impossible to roll 
> the CCRMA bits directly into Fedora proper?  And what can we do to fix 
> those things?

I can only bring my own point of view here. 

I don't think there is anything of a technical nature that prevents any
packages from moving (ignoring any non-free dependency stuff, of
course). 

Probably what is needed is more packagers that also use the stuff in day
to day music-making (BTW, I'm not complaining about current packagers),
and are commited to maintaining packages in the long term. And keeping
on top of new versions as they are released. That is what makes Planet
CCRMA tick. But packaging is notoriously unsexy stuff to do. I know. 

I currently don't see an advantage in maintaining packages _myself_ in
the Fedora environment as opposed to the Planet CCRMA system. It takes
far longer to do anything, or at least that is my perception. Maybe it
is because of lack of knowledge - I have not even caught up to the move
from plague to koji! (pretty pathetic, I know), but I don't have (m)any
cycles to burn on what I perceive to be non-essential stuff. In the time
it takes to discuss if we should release ardour 2.4 on f8 (I don't think
we ever saw 2.3.1, right?) to the masses I released a testing version
for fc6/7/8 in the Planet CCRMA repositories[*]. And I used to be a lot
more on top of releases (ie: Planet CCRMA moves quite slowly these
days :-). 

And to the point. Why not release ardour 2.4 on f8? Is it because it has
new features and those should be reserved to f9? Why? Users probably
want to use them _now_ and not wait till f9 comes out, at least the kind
of users I have (used to have?) on Planet CCRMA. Or is it because it may
be unstable? As if all the software in Fedora is stable, right? :-p

Do we want Fedora/Music to be rock stable? Or do we want a fast moving
music environment that keeps up to the latest and greatest? The later
would seem more "in tune" with Fedora itself and is what I used to do on
Planet CCRMA...

And to do it, how do we keep track of the latest and greatest and
release it fast?

-- Fernando

[*] nothing is for free of course. I tested ardour 2.4 on f8 briefly so
for all I know it may be broken everywhere else. Borrowed spec/etc from
the koji builder to stay synched with Fedora's...