Will’s Miro dev blog

I haven’t put Dapper and Feisty builds for Miro 1.1 into the repository yet. The Gutsy builds are there, but there are some issues with segfaulting when watching videos with them. I’ve only heard about Gutsy segfaulting with Miro 1.1 from one person and there aren’t any new bugs for the issue. From that I’m guessing the issue is pretty limited user-wise, but don’t really have a good way to measure.

The last few days went like this. We did a Miro 1.1 release on Thursday and I started building Ubuntu builds for Dapper, Feisty and Gutsy that afternoon using the new pbuilder-based scripts I’ve been working on. The pbuilder-based scripts are great in that I can automate building packages for Dapper, Feisty and Gutsy for i686 on a single machine (no longer need VMs) and they verify the build-depends lines in the .dsc files. That’ll make building from source possible.

The problem with Miro 1.1 is that the switch from BitTorrent code to libtorrent code causes compiling to take longer. Additionally, the pbuilder-based scripts pull down all the dependencies and build the environment to do the build in for each distribution and that takes a while, too.

When working on builds, I had problems with the Dapper and Feisty builds segfaulting when playing videos during testing. I first blamed the new build scripts. I spent 8 hours or so fiddling with them, verifying all the build steps, and eventually running them in the distribution VMs I had. On Saturday, I decided that theory wasn’t a good one.

I tried a few other things and then started bisecting the svn changes since Miro 1.0 in my Feisty VM to see if I could find the checkin that caused the problem. After a few more hours, I discovered that it was a change to xine_impl.c that I made for bug 9373 that causes the segfaults when viewing videos. Another hour later and I verified this is the same problem with the Dapper build.

I backed out that change and re-ran and re-tested everything.

In summary, the pbuilder-based scripts are fine and backing out that xine_impl.c fix fixes the issues I was seeing.

We’re working on a Miro 1.1.1 release that has some changes that allow for co-branding. We decided to push these changes off to 1.1.1 so that we could release Miro 1.1 a week earlier. I decided that I’d skip builds for Feisty and Dapper for Miro 1.1 and instead do builds when we released Miro 1.1.1 this week. That should happen in the next day or so.

I really apologize for the current situation. It was a confluence of several circumstances that led to me taking a long time to figuring out the cause of the problem which sucked.

I should have 1.1.1 builds of Gutsy, Feisty and Dapper out by Friday night if not sooner.

Other projects are publishing their Bugzilla stats, so I took 30 minutes and threw together a script to run some numbers against our Bugzilla instance.

Two things to keep in mind when looking at these numbers:

1. We migrated our bugs from Trac to Bugzilla in mid-August. Trac wasn’t working out for us and we’ve got a lot of crufty bug data still hanging around since then.
2. The numbers are slices of data. They can indicate things, but there’s a lot of context that they don’t take into account. So it’s good to be careful about drawing conclusions based solely on the numbers reported.

Stats for the year: 2007

BUG STATS
=========

Total bugs created: 4052
      41 - Miro Mediabar
       3 - getmiro.com
      35 - Broadcast Machine
    3809 - Miro
     164 - Miroguide

Bug activity:
     736 - FIXED
     170 - INVALID
      35 - WONTFIX
     139 - DUPLICATE
     169 - WORKSFORME
       0 - MOVED
       0 - NEEDSINFO

    4052 - CREATED
   13564 - COMMENTS

USER STATS
==========

Users created: 645

Top 7 bug reporters:
    3172 - Janet
     138 - Dean Jansen
     102 - Nicholas Reville
      52 - Nick Nassar
      47 - sg
      35 - Fluteman
      28 - Ben Dean-Kawamura

Top 7 bug commenters:
   10354 - Janet
     331 - Nick Nassar
     315 - Will Guaraldi
     312 - Ben Dean-Kawamura
     286 - Luc Heinrich
     259 - Dean Jansen
     217 - Paul Swartz

There are a few things I want to point out.

First, is that we’ve got 645 new Bugzilla users since mid-August. That’s really great!

Second, is that Janet is not a machine that generates 10 bugs and 30 comments every day. What’s going on is that I tied her Bugzilla userid to all the bugs I migrated from Trac for which I had no userid to tie to.

Third, sg and Fluteman are really fantastic. The work they’re doing is making a huge difference in the direction and quality of Miro. Thank you!

Thank you to everyone who’s helped out in 2007. I hope the numbers for 2008 are doubly-impressive.

Miro 1.0 has been released! Yay!

I’ve only been with PCF since July (or maybe it was June–I forget), but since I came on board we’ve been working hard on stability and honing the feature set. Working on stability is hard because there are a near infinite number of combinations of library versions, video card drivers, operating systems, … out there and all of them are slightly different. Writing software that works on multiple platforms is non-trivial. It’s a huge testament to the community of users and testers and developers that Miro is at the point it’s at now.

One thing about 1.0 that I want to mention is that this is a snapshot in time of a continually evolving piece of software. If you look at Bugzilla, there are dozens of interesting features that we’re all interested in that range from starting Miro as a daemon process to viewing video as it’s downloading.

Chris, Nick and Ben are working on post-1.0 development already. There’s been discussions on the develop mailing list regarding reworking the user interface to use native widgets and make it much faster and more responsive. Paul is continuing work on the Miro Guide. Janet is working on making community testing easier for everyone involved and produce better testing data. I’m switching off to work on Mediabar. Dean and the Team Miro folks are working on honing the documentation and they’re doing a fantastic job of testing and identifying issues for release candidates and versions.

Miro development is moving along and its momentum is a direct result of us all working towards a common goal: building an Internet video player using Open Source and open standards that will enable the current generation of media content to flourish.

One other thing I want to mention is that we ditched the conflicts between the miro package and the sun-java*-plugin packages for Gutsy and Feisty. The problem between the packages still exists and it’s intermittent, but several conversations with people caused me to rethink adding the conflicts. So this doesn’t fix anything–it’s just trading one set of problems for another, however I’ve come around to agree that the conflict is more of a pain in the ass than occasional intermittent crashes.

We released 0.9.9.9 yesterday and it took us 5 or 6 hours from tagging the branch to releasing builds. That’s pretty cool and makes for a smooth release. Also, I didn’t screw anything up this time.

I’m an employee of PCF so it’s my job to work on Miro (and the other things I work on). However, I’m just one guy and time is a limited resource. There’s no way I can triage, identify and fix all bugs. I appreciate all the help that I can get. I had a bunch of help this release.

I wanted to thank the following people for the time they spent submitting quality bugs, sending in patches, and helping me fix issues:

• Simon from dbus-python who walked me through fixing the dbus-python deprecation issue and reviewed the code changes I made.
• Markus who helped me with a variety of Gutsy and Gutsy packaging issues.
• Paul who noticed our README was out of date and suggested changes.
• Matthias who helped with Gutsy and Feisty packaging issues.
• Gotz who helped with packaging issues.
• Stéphane who helped with packaging issues.
• Marco who helped with packaging issues.

If there’s anyone else that helped out that I’ve forgotten, I apologize. Please kick me and/or comment below.

We’re well on the path to a solid 1.0. When 1.0 is finally out, we start working through the architecture changes required for many of the features that have been suggested.

I want to clarify the situation with Miro and the sun-java6-plugin package.

Prior to 0.9.9.9, if you had the sun-java6-plugin installed and you install Miro, then Miro would crash on startup. For 0.9.9.9, we added a conflict with the sun-java6-plugin package. That means that in order to install Miro, you will have to uninstall the sun-java6-plugin.

I’ve gotten a lot of flack for this fix in the last couple of days–and for good reason: this sucks for users who have that plugin installed. I definitely understand the frustration and we don’t consider this a final solution. (As a philosophical note, most development solutions are not final–most things can be changed if a better feasible option is found and implemented.)

The bottom line is that if you use the sun-java6-plugin plugin, you can’t use Miro. Adding the conflict line to the package makes it more user-friendly when installing Miro because then you’re not stuck in a situation where you have installed Miro, it crashes on startup, and you have no clue why.

We’re interested in a real solution for this problem. Details of the problem are in these bugs:

• bug 5092
• bug 8444
• bug 9064

If you have feasible ideas, add them in the comments on bug 9064 or comment here.

It’s been a wild couple of days. I finished up the rc0 release for Windows and Mac OSX on Saturday, spent Sunday upgrading my laptop from Feisty to Gutsy and then on Monday we had some quirky subversion collisions.

We’ve worked out some/most of the issues with the Ubuntu packaging for Miro and build a package for Gutsy. This package is available in the Miro repositories.

Things to note:

1. This package is release candidate 0 for version 0.9.9.9. If you are at all squeamish about testing software in a beta state, you should wait for the 0.9.9.9 final release which will be sometime this week or next week.
2. Back up your ~/.miro directory BEFORE installing and using this package. If there were issues, you want to be able to go back to your previous Miro state.
3. Miro conflicts with sun-java6-plugin. You can’t have both installed at the same time. This is a workaround for problems we’re having with the sun-java6-plugin, gtkmozembed, and Miro. If this is a problem for you, you should wait until the 0.9.9.9 final release. It’s possible we’ll have a different fix for it by then, but it’s more likely that this will happen in version 1.0 or later. If you know how to set up gtkmozembed so that it doesn’t load plugins, let us know.

Instructions:

If you follow the directions at http://www.getmiro.com/download/ubuntu.php but use:

deb http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/pculture.org/miro/linux/repositories/ubuntu gutsy/

as the line to add, then you’ll pick up the Miro repository for Gutsy.

What to do if things don’t work:

Let us know if you have any problems. Good ways to do this would be:

• add to an existing bug report or create a new bug report in our Bugzilla system, and/or
• comment here (but make sure I have some way to reply to you)
• hop on #miro on irc.freenode.net and let us know.

And if it worked great, we’d love to know that, too.

Someone (possibly Janet) created a gutsy keyword in Bugzilla, so I went through and tagged all the bugs that I think are gutsy related with the gutsy keyword: http://bugzilla.pculture.org/buglist.cgi?keywords=gutsy.

There are a few other issues floating around that are related to our feisty packaging–I’m going to try to fix those while I’m fiddling with packaging.

I’ve copied over the debian-feisty packaging to debian-gutsy in the repository. Today I’m working on getting the kinks out of building, going through all the files to make sure they work, and testing the resulting package.

Once I get to a point where the resulting package is building and stable on both of my machines, I’ll post the packages for other people to test.

That’s where I am with things. I imagine this will be an all-day thing.

I’ll post something here when I have a 0.9.9.9-rc0 gutsy package ready for testing and solicit help in regards to testing from the people who have been posting bugs.

Any thoughts, suggestions, et al–comment below.

Here’s the current state of Miro on Gutsy:

• we don’t have a Gutsy package of Miro for 0.9.9.1 (the current release)
• Gutsy does work with what will become Miro 0.9.9.9 (the very soon-to-be released release)

The first Miro version we plan on supporting for Gutsy is 0.9.9.9 which will be released soon–probably in the next week if all goes well. We have been testing with Gutsy over the last month and we have instructions for building Miro on Gutsy in Trac. I want to emphasize that Miro 0.9.9.9 will work nicely on Gutsy and the primary issue here is a packaging one.

The Gutsy universe repository has a Miro 0.9.8 package in it. I’ve tested it on my Gutsy box and it works for me, however it’s missing a lot of the fixes that we’ve made for 0.9.9.9 which should alleviate problems with Miro and specific video cards. So if it works for you, then that’s great, but if it doesn’t, then you’re going to have to wait until 0.9.9.9.

I plan on making a pass through Bugzilla and make sure any outstanding Gutsy issues are resolved. Additionally, I’ll take a pass through LaunchPad and make sure we catch any bugs that didn’t get reported upstream to us.

We’ll be tagging our repository for 0.9.9.9 rc1 soon–hopefully today and have an rc1 out by tomorrow for Windows and Mac OSX. We’ll get a Gutsy rc1 out as soon as we can, but it’ll probably take a few days.

If you want to help out with testing rc1, let me know and I’ll be sure to point you in the right direction and/or watch the Miro Testing blog.

If you have any problems, please write up a bug in Bugzilla, comment on an existing bug with additional information, and/or hop on #miro on irc.freenode.net and let us know.

If you have any thoughts, please comment here and if the plan changes at all, I’ll post an update.

As an aside, Gutsy is a great Ubuntu release–I’m running it on one of my machines already and look forward to upgrading my other machine.