Will’s Miro dev blog

I did a bunch of release-management stuff, some minor bug triage work and some minor Gutsy work.

I passed a bunch of email back and forth with BDK and James regarding problems between Miro and the sun-java*-plugin packages on Gutsy and Feisty (bug 8444 and now bug 9064). BDK looked into it further but in the end either the test we’re using to determine whether the problem exists or not is bogus or we didn’t fix the issue. Regardless, after much discussion it was decided that the package conflicts were worse than the problem so we removed the conflicts for 1.0 final.

I got in touch with Dean’s friend Ben (not to be confused with BDK or my brother Ben), and he and I are going to go through our Gutsy and Feisty packaging and fix any outstanding issues (like bug 8716). I think this is pretty cool and hope that this is the first of many Boston-area Miro hack-fests.

I also worked on Mediabar. I’ve been doing a pass at cleaning up namespace issues and code cleanup. After I’m done with that, I’ll work on the tab rearchitecture and the rss discovery problems. Neil and I traded some email and he’s eager to work on things again. I’m currently the bottleneck on further Mediabar progress–I’ll be spending the rest of the week fixing that. I want to get back to working on the Firefox patch, too and get that done ASAP.

On a side note, I was selected for the Nokia n810 device program. I want to look into porting Miro over to the device and do some other development, too. It’ll be a good system for figuring out how Miro could work on “smaller devices” and what a slimmed down version of Miro can do. I also want to look into what it would take to get Miro working with Conduit so that Linux users can move video content to their n810 and other portable video playing devices.

As a side note, I live in Somerville, MA. If anyone (users, testers, developers, …) is interested in getting together to triage bugs, working out issues, fix problems, add features, … let me know. I’m totally game for hack-fests and getting together.

I mothered the 0.9.9.9 release on Wednesday, which went really smoothly, and then the 0.9.9.9.1 release on Thursday, which sucked and took two days to sort out. I had problems doing svn checkouts on the Windows build box (took in excess of 1.5 hours for a single checkout) and then problems with the windows-xul setup.py script which had bugs when the version number contains more than four pieces. I had some help from Nassar working that out, but it sucked up most of my time and I didn’t really get much else accomplished.

Over the weekend, I helped out a few users who were having problems with 0.9.9.9 on Gutsy.

On Monday, I worked on Mediabar and continued building a new Windows XP vm.

Today I worked on legal stuff, bug triage (making sure I’ve got all the things I need to get done for 1.0 done) and Windows XP vm stuff.

Overall it was a week short on getting things accomplished and long on random problems and wasted time. Frustrating.

I plan on working on Mediabar and Firefox 3.0 patch work in the foreseeable future. I’ll probably be avoiding IRC for a while.

This week I spent time on:

• gutsy-related issues
• gutsy packaging issues
• dbus-python deprecation warning (6226)
• sun-java*-plugin problems with Miro and gtkmozembed (8444)
• problems with mismatched gtkmozembed between compiling and linking
• tagging and releasing rc1 and rc2
• triaging all bugs assigned to me

Also, Dean and I went to PodCamp Boston 2 this weekend. Talking to people about Miro resulted in one of three possibilities:

1. the person was really psyched about Miro, uses it frequently/all-the-time and had some questions about future development
2. the person thought Miro was neat, but either hadn’t used it or thought it was still called Democracy Player
3. the person was wholly uninterested in Miro and didn’t really see the point of having another media player in the space alongside players like FireAnt and Joost

The first group was really exciting to talk to. Dean and I tried to hook this group into Team Miro and other Miro-related activities. Mostly I just basked in the warm glow of a happy user–things have been cold and miserable recently.

The second group was interesting and most people in this group asked the important questions. I think connecting with this group was the most important thing I did over the weekend.

The third group wasn’t really all that exciting to talk to. Their priorities don’t match ours and I suspect most of them just feel hassled by the fact that there’s another media player to think about.

I also spent time listening to what terms people used for “video media feeds”. I heard “vidcast”, “video cast”, and “video podcast” most often, I think. Just some more data in the “what the hell should we call this thing”? bucket.

After 0.9.9.9-rc2 and 0.9.9.9 final, I’m going to be spending all my time on mediabar and the Firefox extension. If I don’t do that, I’m not going to meet the deadlines.

I got a Mozilla Bugzilla account and commented on the bugs that Alex Faaborg created to track changes we want to make for Firefox 3.0. We’ve got a couple of months to do the changes, but Alex said that Chris said that he’d like to see it as an extension first. I’m not sure we can do that, but I plan on looking into it.

I spent an hour finishing up the Bugzilla timeline script that I’ve been working on over the last month or so and made it public. You can see it at http://bugzilla.pculture.org/timeline.cgi.

I spent a day or so pushing out rc0 and honing our ReleaseProcess documentation. I also did a pass through our bugs for low hanging fruit that we’ve been sitting on after looking at the LaunchPad bugs for Miro. I had problems with the Windows build machine which Matt helped me through.

Then I wrote some blog entries about our Gutsy situation so that users and developers knew what the status was. I worked on the gutsy packaging. BDK and I had an svn issue where he did an svn cp ... (r5515) and that wiped out my changes (r5512, r5513, and r5514). We’re not entirely sure what happened.

I conversed with an unhappy and frustrated user who doesn’t like that we’ve set up Miro to conflict with sun-java6-plugin. No one thinks it’s an ideal solution, but it’s the best one we’ve got right now. After talking about it on #miro-hackers, BDK created a bug to revisit the java plugin situation for 1.0. I’m going to see if I can find anyone at Mozilla that would know whether you can embed gtkmozembed without the plugins (I think that’s the right question to ask–if not, poke me). The current consensus is that there’s nothing we can do, but it sure would be nice to find out that we’re wrong and the magic pixie in the sky can come down and make the problem go away.

Earlier today we released 0.9.9.9-rc0 gutsy package in a new gutsy repository. It’s my first packaging experience. Our README for it is really good; I made some minor updates while I was fiddling with things.

Also, I thought PodCamp was last weekend–turns out it’s next weekend. That was confusing. I figured it out after traveling on the T, getting there, puzzling about why no one else was there, calling my wife to see if I was in the wrong place, sighing deeply when I found out I’m at the right physical location but the wrong chronological location, and then taking the T home. The good thing that came out of this is that I got to test my raincoat which I had just waterproofed–it works pretty well.

I spent Sunday upgrading my laptop from Feisty to Gutsy and trying to reproduce some of the gutsy bugs we’ve got–I haven’t been able to. It’s likely there are other things involved that I’m not aware of yet.

I’m going to spend some time to upgrade my desktop to Gutsy as well and then build virtual machines for Dapper, Feisty and Gutsy. So then we’ll have another person who can cover Ubuntu releases and testing and such.

Update 10/24/2007: I forgot to talk about the Mediabar Firefox extension… I haven’t touched it in at least two weeks–possibly more. It has some big issues that need to be figured out, but I’ve been spending time on other things. I do want to get it fixed up because it is a useful extension. I’ll try to find some time for it in the next week or so.

I spent the last week pawning bugs off on other people while I come up to speed with Firefox development. Alex Faaborg wrote a blog entry about Firefox and Miro which piqued our interest. The result of the conversations around that blog entry launched me into Firefox development.

My first impression is that Mozilla has a massive code base. They’ve got a lot of code for a lot of products and they’re managing it with an intricate series of make files and scripts. It has taken a while to come up to speed and I’m still spending time figuring things out. I’ve written some loose notes about getting started with Firefox development on my other blog. As a side note, it’s tough having two blogs.

Today Alex formalized the issues into bug 400059.

I spent Saturday at the Ubuntu Massachusetts Install Fest which went fantastically. I talked to a bunch of people about Miro, Ubuntu and Free Software. Most people I talked to either hadn’t heard of Miro at all or had heard of it, but didn’t realize we had changed the name. I’m not sure what that means in the grand scheme of things, but everyone was pretty interested in the current state of the project.

This coming Friday is the start of PodCamp Boston 2. Dean, possibly Chris, and I are going to attend some/many/most of the days and talk to people about the Miro ecosystem. Dean’s also talked to Chris Brogan about making the sessions available as a feed somewhere so that we can turn it into a channel and put it on the Miro Guide. I’m not a big fan of tech evangelism, but I think telling people about the Miro ecosystem is generally a good thing for everyone involved. It’s good for us for the obvious reasons. It’s good for content producers because it’s important for them to understand the publishing side of the equation and that they don’t have to be tied down to a host/publisher. It’s important for the rest of the world because the more people realize they have options, the more those options continue to exist and the less likely it is that unpopular voices are muted. That’s some serious stuff.

I think I’m going to spend the coming week continuing work on the Firefox patch and poking around with the Firefox code base. I suspect things will slow down a bit as I start asking more questions and waiting for answers. That’ll give me time to continue working on the Mediabar.

As a side note, I’m now using Firefox 3.0 dev–it’s pretty interesting.

Update 10-21-2007: I got this weekend confused with next weekend. Not quite sure how I did that. Next weekend (26th-28th) is PodCamp and FOSSCamp. It was a good thing, too, because I spent this weekend pushing out 0.9.9.9 rc0 and upgrading my laptop to Gutsy.

It’s been a really really busy week. I put Mediabar down and played catch-up with Miro and infrastructure.

I fixed (or at least think I fixed) a few UDE-type errors (#8705, #8706, #8699, #8820, #8737), passed a bug to BDK, passed a bug to Chris, and I think I may have passed a bug to Nassar, too.

We didn’t previously have any official policy regarding contributions from non-PCF employees. I spent some time putting together a policy for handling code contributions and also for checking code into the SVN repository. I’ve talked with Ben and Chris about it so far and ironed out some issues. I think it’s pretty decent now. https://develop.participatoryculture.org/trac/democracy/wiki/TheRules

I spent some time going through all the code and adding GPL/Copyright headers to files that didn’t already have them. I haven’t done this to XML, XUL, or DTD files–I think I’m going to leave them be. Part of the reason is that there are a lot of them. The other part of the reason is that they’re in a bunch of different markups and I’m not wildly psyched about trying to jam GPL/Copyright headers into them in such a way that it doesn’t screw up how those files are used in the code.

I finished up an “alpha” version of the timeline script for Bugzilla. It needs some more work and it has some bugs, so it’s not quite ready for prime time. I hope to have this done by the end of the week, but finding time to work on it has been difficult.

Dean is talking to contarc/Jay about skinning Bugzilla and making other changes. In order for that to work well, I needed to re-work things so we can manage the changes we’re making to Bugzilla better. I spent today fixing my changes to meet the Bugzilla recommended method for changes and checked everything into SVN.

It’ll be really nice to have a better Bugzilla, but we need to make sure that it meets the needs of the developers and testers as well as the rest of the community. I’ve heard a lot of opinions about what it should and shouldn’t look like and that concerns me. While we’re pushing to get Miro 1.0 and Mediabar 1.0 out the door, I don’t think we should be spending gobs of time on changing minor things in Bugzilla unless the changes are necessary to fix some real problem we all agree exists.

On Sunday, Dean, Chris and I met up with Asheesh from Creative Commons and SJ from OLPC and talked about the world as it revolves around Miro and other things. It was really interesting stuff, but also pretty overwhelming. Then we went to a GNOME Summit bar thing.

I’m planning on switching back to Mediabar stuff tomorrow (Wednesday). I need to finish the tab-friendly re-architecture and I need to figure out how to deal with the recent rss-download issue Neil bumped into. Then there’s a lot of little stuff that needs to be done. My rough guess is that I’ll be working on Mediabar for another couple of weeks with some time spent on Miro and Bugzilla.

I think I’m going to lay low on IRC for the next week–I need to be talking less and doing more. My queue of things to do is starting to get too big for me to wrap my head around and I’m starting to feel a bit overwhelmed.

I didn’t get a whole lot checked in over the last week.

I put Planet Miro together. I’ve been toying with a timeline script for Bugzilla which is now partially working (but on my local machine). I’m trying to figure out how to keep the script and related templates separate but a part of the Bugzilla code so that if/when we upgrade Bugzilla, we don’t have to spend time extracting the changes I’ve been making and re-do them. I haven’t come up with any good answers, though. I’m thinking I may just check a bunch of files into SVN with a big README on how to apply them to Bugzilla and which files go where. This is a big paragraph, but I only spent maybe 3 or 4 hours on Bugzilla stuff.

In Mediabar land, I added the code for adding and editing helper program information. It still needs some code for verifying the data that the user entered and there are a few other FIXMEs for things that need to be finished off. But for the most part, users can add, edit, and delete helper programs and assign them to the various media types and that all works now.

I’ve spent a majority of my time working on re-architecting the extension to be tab-friendly–mostly learning how all the XUL pieces fit together. I think I need another day or two to finish my research, then I’ll do the re-architecture. I started writing up a specification, but my ideas and understanding of what’s going on is changing too quickly to make that worth-while at this stage. I’ll finish the specification up in a couple of days.

Neil has been moving along with other bug fixes, so we’ve been getting things done even though the project is waiting on the tab-friendly re-architecture code changes.

In Miro land, I did a pass at updating the miro.1 man file and I think that’s about it. Chris took some of the bugs I was sitting on and fixed them. I want to spend some time to finish the other ones off since they’re worth fixing.

Also, there was a guy on #miro-hackers last week named, but I forget his name. He was asking whether we want help with our Windows platform. I had to leave, though, and I haven’t seen him online since.

Overall, it’s been a week of spinning my wheels wishing I had a lot more prior experience with JavaScript and XUL.