[Fedora-music-list] ardour 2.4 was out

[Fernando Lopez-Lezcano]

On Wed, 2008-04-09 at 10:34 -0400, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:
> On Wed, 9 Apr 2008, Fernando Lopez-Lezcano wrote:
> >> 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.
> 
> Yep.  And yet, we've got hundreds of volunteers doing exactly that in the 
> Fedora world. 

That is good....

> There are many open questions about the quality of these 
> packages, though.

At least the ones that I have looked at seem to be pretty good - but I
have not looked at really complicated stuff[*]. Of the ones the migrated
from Planet CCRMA I dare say they got better (less hacks I guess :-). 

> > 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
> 
> Heh.
> 
> So again, there are tradeoffs that come with using Fedora itself.  One of 
> those tradeoffs is accepting, or arguing about, a bunch of policies. 

I agree, comes with the territory. I hope I didn't sound too whiny. 

> The alleged benefit for you, Nando, would be to cut your workload by a 
> significant amount.  But that clearly isn't happening.

Well, it _has_ happened, just not to the degree, or as fast as we
expected it to happen. Part of it may be that there are more options now
in terms of distributions and users have migrated over the years to
other distros, and some of those may be audio apps packagers as well. 

> > 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?
> 
> Good questions.

Any answers from the rest of the audience?? Or comments? :-)

> It may well be that CCRMA should continue to be fully independent, but 
> have a much stronger base of Fedora packages to draw from, 

That has already happened I think, there's a lot of stuff that I used to
package in the, say, Fedora 1 or RedHat 9 days that now comes directly
from Fedora. You know, general purpose support packages that other
packages need to be able to build. Or even music related stuff like
Csound. 

> and Nando, when 
> you see fit, you can supersede a Fedora package with a newer package in 
> CCRMA.  That would be a pretty good outcome, too.
> 
> Basically: you're doing awesome work, maybe the best work in the Linux 
> music space, and we at Fedora need to continue to find incremental ways to 
> lighten your load without getting in your way.
> 
> How many CCRMA packages currently have Fedora analogues at this point, 
> anyway?

Hmmm, I don't really know, I should run a script to see exactly what is
the status these days. But the packages that have migrated to Fedora
proper I try not to replicate in my repos (Ardour is an exception right
now). 

I forgot to add that we have extended Planet CCRMA to embrace CentOS
(ahem!) as well. Arnaud Gomes-do-Vale at IRCAM had been supporting that
option for a while (a fantastic job) and I finally came through and
installed plague and friends in our build server so that a build system
and shared svn repo for specs and all that is in place. So there's a lot
more help than before (for example the packaging for LV2 that I just
released was done by Arnaud). 

-- Fernando

[*] if you want to get a headache take a look at what I had to do to get
pd-extended built into subpackages for all the external collections....