Present Perfect

GStreamer

Things are like a yo-yo at the moment. The friction that I had anticipated after both leading figures on GStreamer have taken a break is starting to get to us. Which is good, in a way. This will force us to deal with some of the issues we've been struggling with now that we don't have a clear community leader.

I had anticipated much worse than this when I realized that Wim was also going to take a little break. I had feared development would have ground to a halt. Right now, development isn't as clean or careful as it used to be, but in the end we're still getting in the features we need. I guess I am going to have to be slightly more aggressive, but in a nice way, to make sure the end result is a buildable working product. And I'll have to do that without hampering others too much in their work style.

People sometimes say that a pure democracy doesn't work, and a dictatorship doesn't really work either if people don't stand behind the dictator. For a project like ours, I guess for now the best way of getting stuff done is to divide responsibilities among people that know how to live up to it. That means, don't let someone who just wants to code and do new stuff maintain the build, for example. But it also means for someone like me at this point to not interfere too much with actual development. Something I'm not doing, by the way, at this point.

Since GStreamer is now part of my job, I will however get back to coding again soon enough. My selfimposed break from GStreamer to work on Dave/Dina has paid off well, but I need to get back in the game.

So, it seems dolphy is finally able to get back on libgstplay again now that the dust in the core is settling down. There are some minor RGB issues left to be fixed, and some seeking work to fix, and then we can throw out a player again. The nice thing is that software scaling and interactivity now works, so that means that I can finally live up to our promise to Michael Meeks. We're coming for your desktop, monkey boy.

With Robert Love (his Linux 2.6 book is funny, well-written and understandable for non-kernel-hackers, so get it) being hired by Ximian/Novell to work on desktop/kernel/whatever integration, I hope Ximian finally realizes that multimedia is the one missing link from their corporate desktop offering. All those suits just want to play their funny videos from evolution. And we're getting ever closer to being there.

mach

0.4.3 (Hot Water) is out the door. It now has support for Fedora 1, finally.

Right before releasing I couldn't figure out why it had completely stopped working. It was ignoring my custom config file for some reason. After trying everything, I just gave up and started reverting patches one by one.

It seemed I had put a # to comment a line, while I could only use //. I was trying to figure out what was wrong, poking Gustavo Niemeyer in the process, before I realized that I had to use //. I told him that was the problem, and suggested apt should at least warn me the configuration file is wrong...

There are projects that you use every day and you get some sort of mental image in your head, and you're a bit timid when approaching these people. And most of the time, when you do, they all turn out really nice. Well. Of course I haven't ever had a reason to poke the xscreensaver developer :)

Barcelona

I was getting worked up today by the way internal conflicts were turning out. One of the differences between work stuff and open source development is that arguments tend to be drawn out more in the open, for all to see. People were breaking out the popcorn and so on. I'm not going to bite into too much flamebaiting. I just want us to get the job done.

And when you go out at night and rollerblade through the city, getting teached the very basics by the best teacher in Barcelona, for free, you tend to put things in perspective. After two hours of wearing my body down, and being teached by a great teacher, who takes time to explain everything and answers every question, and does it all with style, grace, and humour, you can only be humbled by someone's enthusiasm for something.

When experiencing something like this, you tend to let go of all the negative energy you built up in the day before. I'm very relaxed right now.

So, time for bed !

GStreamer Things are like a yo-yo at the moment. The friction that I had anticipated after both leading figures on GStreamer have taken a break is starting to get to...