Will’s Miro dev blog

I haven’t written much in the last couple of weeks because I was on vacation. On the first day of vacation, I went to the beach and got knocked over by a wave, somersaulted for a while, jammed my shoulder somehow, skinned my knee, and finally came up for air. I said, “Screw this!” and went back to my beach chair where I sat around, bled, whined about how my shoulder hurt and ended up with a serious sunburn. I spent the next few days indoors–vacation is dangerous.

In the last couple of weeks, I threw together a preferences panel and a channel settings dialog which, while mostly functional, are “putrid looking”. Luc is going to spend some time fixing that. Ben spent time re-implementing itemlists and allowing for channel searches, saving channel searches, and some other things. We’ve been tweaking the widgets to make them more functional and pretty.

We still have a lot of other ui stuff that still needs fixing and tweaking. The dialogs that you sometimes see at startup when things are awry need reimplementing. The sort bars need to be reimplemented. There are some other tawdry odds and ends that also need to be redone. Generally, things are coming together and most of the big features are in, but there’s a bunch of work that still needs to happen.

This morning, we talked about where we want to draw the line and encourage people to start testing the nightlies again. We haven’t thus far because the laundry list of things that weren’t working was pretty long. Janet thinks it’s probably a good idea until most of her litmus tests pass. Otherwise you’ll all be wasting your time finding things we already know about.

However, I think if you’re interested in testing out Miro 2.0, we’ve hit a point where it’s stable enough to use. I think we’re at what other projects would deem an Alpha 2 state.

Definitely take the time to back up your database BEFORE you try testing a nightly.

We’ve got a laundry list of issues targeted for 2.0. If you encounter problems with a nightly, let us know. We hang out on #miro-hackers on freenode and on the develop mailing list, too.

If you’re interested in helping out, we sure could use the help: testing, translating, triaging existing bugs, writing patches, drawing a fancy 20 page comic describing how great Miro 2.0 is going to be, ….

I apologize for skipping last week’s status of trunk.

Trunk is still unstable. I consider “trunk is stable” to mean that most things are re-implemented and it’s usable. We’re not quite there yet. I’m seeing occasional crashers (most of them my fault so far), there are a bunch of features that haven’t been re-implemented (site search, channel search, playing through a playlist, setting preferences, …), and there’s still ui nits that need ironing out.

We’re moving along, though it seems as if the progress comes in waves during the week. I think part of this is that we’re all using git over svn and batching commits. I know I am.

I was gone all last week at OSCON, but I’m back again to help out with the push to Miro 2.0.

You can follow along in your story book with the Trac timeline.

First off, sorry that this status update is so late–I was side tracked on Wednesday and then the status slipped my mind.

In the last week and a half, there’s been a lot of progress in trunk. While we haven’t re-implemented everything yet, we’re doing pretty well.

You can follow along in your story book with the Trac timeline.

I really appreciate your patience. I think we’ve got another few days to a week before testing builds is useful where “useful” is defined as “you’ll start having a good chance of catching things we don’t already know about”.

Over the last week I’ve been coming up to speed on the architectural changes that occurred when Ben landed the new widget code. I’ve also been hooking up menu items to their respective behavior and fixing bugs on the Linux and Windows platforms. In many cases, I’ve been re-implementing the behavior using the new messaging system which has required me to read through the “old” code and figure out what the behavior used to be. Progress was slow at the beginning, but is picking up now.

You can see checkins progress in the Trac timeline.

There’s still a lot of work to do to get things working again, but things are progressing.

So, why all the trouble? Why not just leave it as is? Off the top of my head:

1. Miro’s UI is no longer rendered using HTML templates. w00t!
2. It looks like overall memory usage is lower by around 20%.
3. Memory usage of Miro when displaying feeds with lots of items scales much better.
4. Miro’s faster at displaying feeds with lots of items (where “lots” is defined as > 50).
5. Miro on Windows is no longer a XULRunner application; instead we’re embedding XULRunner for web-browsing. XULRunner is a great platform, but this change makes Miro a Python application on OSX, Linux and Windows and we can unify our toolset. That’s a huge win for us and reduces the amount of work it takes to maintain all three platforms.

Regarding the performance gains, I’m seeing those on Windows and Linux, but I definitely haven’t spent a lot of time doing rigorous measurements. Treat them as if they were wild unsubstantiated rumor. I haven’t used Miro on Mac OSX enough to notice anything there, yet.

Getting there…!

Just as a word of warning, if all goes well, Ben will be merging into trunk what he and others have been working on over the last few months in the next day or so. When that happens, trunk will become very broken and will remain that way for possibly a week as folks work on stabilizing the new user interface code and reimplementing a bunch of features… silly things like being able to play videos.

If you’re tracking trunk or using nightlies, you should seriously consider waiting a week to update.

You might ask, “Gah! What a bunch of idiots! Why are they doing this?!” The answer is that the widget overhaul is very badly needed and it’ll fix one of several big performance issues that Miro currently has. It’s a big change and it’ll cause a big mess for a short while, but it’s going to make a big big big difference.

In order to do this quickly, we’ll be focusing pretty hard on getting trunk working again for a while. My apologies if any of us seem like we’re dropping off the face of the earth or ignoring questions, concerns, …

• (r6949, bug 9908) gstreamer renderer uses gconfvideosink now–much better video output
• (lots of revisions) new user interface
• (lots of revisions) Windows ui looks and acts like Mac OSX ui
• (bunch of revisions) all unit tests pass

Am I missing anything? Let me know in the comments.

What landed in trunk recently?

• (r6564, bug 9692) initial round of hardy support — this is ongoing; help is more than welcome
• (r6637) u3 support for the windows-xul platform
• (lots of revisions) user interface overhaul — this covers a lot of revisions and is ongoing work

Am I missing anything? Let me know in the comments.

I’m starting a new category of my devblog where I’ll mention what’s just landed in trunk. This does two things:

1. it forces me to keep track of what’s landing in trunk
2. it’s an easier to digest view of things than Trac timeline of svn
3. it’ll let people know what’s in the pipe
4. it gives people who are tracking trunk a vague idea of stability levels

I’ll start blogging interesting things landing in trunk with their revision numbers and probably break it down into bug fixes, enhancements, and misc stuff.

Any thoughts, suggestions, et al–toss them in the comments.