Will’s Miro dev blog

This week I fixed some bugs, worked on some bugs that I didn’t get anywhere with, and finally tagged and released Miro 1.2 rc0.

I also did some work with getting Miro on Gutsy to compile against xulrunner 1.9 in the backports repository. I was basing the work on the set of packages the Ubuntu people maintain. There are some changes in there I don’t understand the relevance of and their changelog isn’t very helpful. I pinged Fabien, but haven’t heard anything back from him.

As a side note, and I can’t imagine I’m alone in this feeling, Windows bugs really suck and take gobs and gobs of time to work through.

This week was an ok bug-fixing week. I worked on:

• Bug 9644: implemented a preference allowing you to switch between renderers on GTKX11–it’s not great, but it’s good enough (probably).
• Bug 3067: applied a patch for suspending the screensaver when playing video in fullscreen on GTKX11… then I found a couple of problems with it and backed it out today.
• Fixed a bunch of other bugs related to gstreamer renderer, ff/rew, revver, mefeedia, …
• Worked on bug 9214 where if you click on the delete link when viewing a video in fullscreen on GTKX11, then you’re stuck in fullscreen. I worked on it for a couple of days and ended up giving up today.
• Sent out a proposed tentative release schedule for Miro 1.2 to the develop mailing list.
• Helped with some of the initial GSoC preparation.

Next week I’m going to:

• Bug 9692. Check out Fabien’s patches for Ubuntu that get Miro to work with xulrunner 1.9.
• Bug 9691. Look into Miro compiling with gcc 4.3. Uwe said something that suggested that gcc 4.3 on Debian is imminent. So… this needs to be figured out.
• Continue to shepherd Miro 1.2 until it’s out the door.

Busy busy busy….

It was an exciting week:

• Bought a new laptop (Dell 1420n with Ubuntu Gutsy on it, 4 GB of memory and BRIGHT YELLOW)
• Spent a couple of days switching to the new laptop and getting VNC working on my desktop machine
• Worked on bugs 9614, 9627 and 3067–9627 took me a while to figure out
• Centralized the list of projects for internships, GSOC, et al — see it at https://develop.participatoryculture.org/trac/democracy/wiki/CommunityProjects
• Toyed with Hardy Heron alpha 5 for a few hours to get a feel for where we are with that; turns out Miro 1.1.2 is in the Hardy repositories, so that’s a good sign

This coming week I’m planning to:

• Work on 1.2 bugs starting with mine and continuing with Nassar’s
• Take a look at the two-stage problem with the subscribe.getmiro.com site

I want to send HUGE thank yous to the following people:

• mutantmonkey for the patch which disables the x screensaver for GTKX11 when watching movies in fullscreen — this is awesome!
• Njaal for the patch so that Miro will automatically stop seeding torrents when a specified ratio is reached in bug 8793
• Sid for the excellent bug report for 9627
• elmargol for help with bug 9614
• Uwe from Debian and Christopher from Ubuntu for the work they’re doing and the help they give us on packaging

Also, I’d like to apologize for posting my last status so late. I back-dated it, so it probably showed up on the planet pretty low.

I installed Hardy Heron alpha 5 in a VM and Miro doesn’t compile on it. Amongst other things, Hardy uses Firefox 3, so it’s likely we’ll have to make some code changes to account for that. I only spent 20 minutes with Hardy and Miro to see where things are at–no clue how much work is going to be involved.

I’d love to get someone(s) to help with working out the issues with Miro on Hardy before Hardy releases. If you’re interested in helping, leave a comment here, send me an email, or find me on IRC.

If no one helps out, then I’ll probably deal with supporting Hardy after Hardy is released.

It was a pretty slow week.

• I spent some time trying to implement 5403 and 8619 on Mac OSX, but then discovered that Luc must use some gui builder tool that I don’t have. So I ended up passing those two bugs off to him.
• I spent some time doing bug triage.
• I fixed a few problems from code flux.
• I worked on 9521 for a few days. It’s a lot more complicated than I thought it was partially because it touches sections of the code I haven’t touched yet. Nassar thinks it’s probably not something we want to bother with. I think I might be able to implement it, but I think it’ll take a week to get it right. I think we should defer it to a future version.

Things I’m planning on doing this week:

• Possibly continue working on 9521 depending on the call.
• The two-stage installer bug is still out there and I have access to pcf3 now, so I think I can solve it. I sent an email to plans regarding that subscribe.getmiro.com site being all kinds of bit-rotty and whether I should spend time fixing it, but didn’t get any replies.
• We got a patch for bug 8793 for implementing ratio restrictions for torrents for GTKX11. The bulk of the patch is the glade code for GTKX11; the actual code is pretty trivial. I’d like to look into this and probably apply it.
• Check out Miro on Ubuntu Hardy (which is in alpha 4 now) and get a feel for where it’s at.

This actually covers two weeks of work because I was in Florida for a bit in between.

Things I did:

• implemented 5403 and 8619 for GTKX11 and Windows
• worked on Mediabar specs (briefly)
• went to the Worcester office to hang out with the Nicks
• bought a Mac mini for Boston devs
• wrote a blog entry about the Firefox 3 work I did so it’s clearer as to what I was working on and how it impacts Miro
• did a 1.1.2 release which contains the exception text for OpenSSL and GPL co-existence (though it’s not entirely clear if I did this right)
• did some bug-fixing on GTKX11 to get the timebar and video information displaying correctly
• did some re-working of the theme I’m using on my devblog so it’s less annoying–still needs some help, though

Things I’m working on this week:

• finishing up work on bugs 5403 and 8619 (though I may end up giving up–I’m not really following where oid comes from in the strings)
• go through the bugs and do some more light triage work and start marking bugs that look bite-sized as such

A little under two weeks ago patches for bugs 303645, 400061 and 400064 landed in the Firefox trunk. These patches add video/audio podcast-related enhancements to the upcoming Firefox 3. Firefox 3’s feed preview page now distinguishes video and audio podcast feeds from “regular feeds”. It will also show all enclosures in the feed with information about the enclosure.

It’s really exciting for these features to be in Firefox 3. These enhancements reduce the interface divide between Firefox and video/audio podcast consuming applications like Miro, iTunes and others. Amongst other things, it’s hugely beneficial to Miro users who use Firefox.

Here’s what the feed preview page looks like in Firefox 2 on Ubuntu Gutsy:

Here’s what the feed preview page will look like in Firefox 3 on Ubuntu Gutsy:

I’m really excited that this is going in. At a bare minimum, it means I have to spend a lot less time fishing through view source finding enclosures.

This is my first contribution to Firefox and my first time working with Mozilla developers and other Firefox contributors. There was a lot of material to come up to speed on including build process, testing procedures, who’s in charge of what, getting reviews done, …

I want to give a shout out to Mike Beltzner who was really patient and incredibly helpful in getting the functionality landed. Also to Robert Sayre and Myk Melez who reviewed the code and suggested changes and fixes that made it much better. Also to Alex Faaborg who kicked off this mini-project back in October. And lastly all the people on #developers on IRC who helped me with issues I was having: Ventnor, biese, bz, gavin, Pike, _FrnchFrgg_ and others–Thank you all!

It was neat in that the patches landed just before the beta 3 codefreeze on my birthday. Having said that, there were a bunch of problems with the patches, many of which were sorted out and fixed by other people. Sorry about that–crappy organization on my part.

I also want to point out that this is a huge advantage that open source has over non-open source: I, as a person external to the project, can still participate in a meaningful way and help implement the functionality that matters to me. That’s very empowering.

Sidenote: That show is What You Ought To Know. It’s a fun show–worth subscribing to.

I really didn’t like the theme I had. Trying out a new one….

I spent the week working on:

• Firefox patches for 303645, 400061, and 400064
• Fixing build issues with Miro 1.1.1 on Gutsy (i386 and amd64), Feisty and Dapper
• Mediabar specs and revival
• Some minor bug triaging
• Bug 9150: implementing feed:// and feeds:// support at the command line

This coming week I’m:

• Working on Mediabar specs and revival
• Any post-landing Firefox patch work
• Working on bugs 9523, 9521 and 5403
• Getting a Mac-mini for Boston devs for testing/development
• Visiting the Worcester office on Thursday, February 7th

It’s been a good week overall. The Firefox 3 B3 codefreeze is tonight and I think I’m on track for landing all three patches, but they haven’t landed yet (as of this writing). We’ll see what happens tonight.

Update: All three patches landed. The one for 400061 had some issues, but myk fixed them and landed it for me.

I put out Gutsy, Feisty and Dapper builds for i386 for Miro 1.1.1 on Tuesday when we did the Miro 1.1.1 release. But… I’m using new scripts and I goofed up the miro-data package. I didn’t have time to figure out the problem, so I attempted to back out the Gutsy amd64 packages and in the process screwed up something else.

I thought I had it all working by Tuesday night, but there were a couple of users that were still experiencing “size mismatch” errors on the miro-data package. So I took some time today to figure out how to deal with the miro-data package I was building, roll up a set of Miro 1.1.1-3 packages for Gutsy i386 and amd64 and push everything out.

Theoretically there should be good Gutsy i386 and amd64 packages for Miro 1.1.1 in addition to the Feisty and Dapper i386 packages I rolled out Tuesday.

Sorry for the delays. I think things are straightened out now. If you’re still having problems feel free to leave a comment below and/or find me on IRC or by email.

Things I did this week:

• Visited the Worcestor office on Thursday.
• Cut a 1.1.1 rc1 release.
• Cut a 1.1.1 final release.
• Built Gutsy, Feisty and Dapper packages for 1.1.1… then spent half a day dealing with repository issues resulting from Gutsy i386 miro-data package being slightly different in some way than the Gutsy AMD64 miro-data package. I haven’t figured out the problem here. I’ll try to do it this week. I suspect foul play. Probably my fault. If you’re having problems with Gutsy, Feisty or Dapper packaging for Miro from the PCF repository, let me know.
• Pulled an all-nighter Friday night working on and finishing up patches for 400061 and 400064. Then spent several days talking with Mozilla folks, fixing the patches based on reviews and generally trying to get as much done as possible to increase the chances of these patches making it into Firefox 3.

Things I plan to do this week:

• Continue pushing the patches for 303645, 400061 and 400064 until they’re landed.
• Figure out what the problem with building the miro-data package is.
• Figure out what to do about a new laptop. I’m currently looking at the Dell 1420N and System76 laptops. Any thoughts on Ubuntu-based laptops would be hugely useful.
• Try to avoid getting involved in anyone else’s work until the patches for Firefox are out of my hands.
• Spending some time with my wife before she forgets who I am.

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.

It was a really busy week–I essentially worked for the last 7 days straight. It’s been a good/bad week for me. I:

• pushed out the Miro 1.1 release on Thursday which had some minor release-engineering issues (I forgot the symlinks for Miro.dmg, the appserial number is 20080101000 but should have been 20080110000, and Feisty and Dapper won’t build)
• I updated the instructions for releases in the wikis which improves the release process going forward
• I spent Thursday night, Friday and most of Saturday investigating the segfaults with the Dapper and Feisty packages and traced it down to the fix for bug 9373
• I backed out the fix for bug 9373–I’ll release Feisty and Dapper packages when we “release” Miro 1.1.1
• I worked on the Firefox patch work for bug 400061
• I made some more changes to the patch for bug 303645, it was reviewed, and it looks like it’s on its way to Firefox 3 (assuming all goes well)

I’m going to spend the next week:

• aiding Paul with the Miro 1.1.1 release
• continuing the work on bug 400061 and friends

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.

I spent the last week:

• fixing some bugs (9373, 8138, 9383, 9372, 9414)
• doing some bug triage
• reworking the Ubuntu packaging scripts to use pbuilder (much easier to build packages and pbuilder verifies the build-depends)
• added a NEEDSINFO resolution to Bugzilla
• tweaked some stuff so we can tag with names like Miro-x.y instead of Democracy-Player-x.y
• mothered through Miro 1.1 rc0 and rc1

I’ll be spending this week:

• finishing up the Miro 1.1 release
• finishing up the Miro 1.1.1 release (with turbo co-branding ass-kicking action)
• working on Mediabar
• fixing some more bugs

Sedatg pointed out the archos-sync project. It’s a script that syncs the content between his Archos media player and Miro. More information at that link.

If anyone was interested in helping out on a syncing project to sync Miro content with devices, that’s probably a good one to help out with.

Anyone else know of similar projects that are building software to sync Miro content, convert content or port Miro to smaller devices? If so, please add a comment. The more exposure to these projects, the better.

I wasn’t around for the last week. I got home last night and spent today recovering from some flu I’ve been fighting for the last week and also continuing work with building a pbuilder environment for Gutsy and friends.

Tomorrow I plan on finishing up the pbuilder stuff and working on the Firefox patches, but … I don’t think I have much of a chance of finishing them in time, so I think I may put it on the backburner and help out with Miro 1.1 and continuing development. Then work on the Firefox patches for 3.1.

Happy New Year!

Figured I’d send this out early because I’m not going to get anything more accomplished.

I spent Wednesday, Thursday and Friday:

• triaging old bugs
• continuing to clean up comment spam left over from when our bug system was managed by Trac
• fixing my Windows build environment problem (bug 9327)
• fixing the problem with Miro on Windows in the 1.0 branch (bug 9363)
• checked in a fix from a downstream reported problem where Miro on GTKX11 doesn’t honor the –xine-driver option (bug 9373, r5897, r5898)
• started making adjustments to our build scripts to allow us to tag with “Miro-1.1″ instead of “Democracy-Player-With-White-Wine-Sauce-1.1″ which is too long and I’m sick of typing it
• set up a pbuilder environment for testing Ubuntu/Debian packages and continuing to make our packages better

That about covers the last three days. pbuilder is really cool, but takes forever to run because it’s building a fresh environment in which ti build everything and it does that by downloading and installing all the packages each iteration. It’s definitely a good idea to do this, though, as it’ll increase the confidence in our Ubuntu/Debian packaging and potentially fix outstanding issues.

I’m doing a whirlwind tour of family visiting over the next few days, then going down to Louisiana on a service trip to rebuild houses. I’ll be back online January 1st.

I submitted a new patch for bug 303645 on the 12th. On the 13th, I started having problems seeing the feed preview page. I talked with the folks on #develop, but wasn’t able to get it working. No clue what the problem is. I did a fresh checkout on a different machine and that works fine, so I continued working on the second machine and produced a better version of the 303645 patch. I’m gone next week and between that and the time I’m going to have to put into the 1.1 release, I don’t think I will get a patch together for the rest of the changes for bug 400059.

Firefox takes me about an hour to compile from scratch. While trying to figure out what my feed preview page problem was, I spent some time using the reports feature in Bugzilla and doing bug triage on old bugs. I also wrote a script to remove comment spam from the comments we migrated from our old Trac bug-tracker. There’s still a lot of comment spam in there. Ick.

I merged the libtorrent changes from trunk to the 1.0 branch and tested out the GTKX11 platform. I went through Ubuntu Gutsy, Gutsy-64, Feisty and Dapper, made sure Miro in the 1.0 branch compiled and updated the requirements as listed in GTKX11BuildDocs.

I tried to test the 1.0 branch of Miro in Windows, but I’m hitting the LIBEAY32.dll problem in bug 9327 and the fix suggested in the comments isn’t working for me. So… my Windows build environment isn’t working again and I don’t know whether the 1.0 branch is stable or not after the merges I did.

That about covers me for this last week.

In the next few days, I plan to help out with the 1.1 release, make sure I have the Ubuntu platforms covered and continue working on the Firefox patch.

I’m gone from December 23rd through December 31st. After December 22nd, I won’t be online again until January 1st.

It’s been a good-ish week.

Nathan finished up his changes for bug 9077, they were merged into the trunk and 1.0 branches, and Janet did some testing and came up with bugs 9334 and 9335. I fixed 9334 but I think I’m going to skip 9335–it involves changing the padding for those items in the item view and I’m not wildly excited about doing that and I think the issue is cosmetic. We only implemented CC metadata at the item scope–not the feed scope, yet.

I worked my way through some bonehead issues I had caused, finished up the patch for bug 303645 and submitted it. I’m a little apprehensive about submitting a patch to Firefox, but … I’ll suck it up. The important thing is that this patch populates the enclosures array for each FeedEntry item. That was a pre-requisite for bug 400059. I’m working on that one now. As a side note, the folks on #developer on the Mozilla IRC channel have been really helpful.

On Friday, I went to lunch with Dean, Chris Blizzard and John Resig–that was really neat. A little hard to quell the star-struck feelings–hopefully I didn’t make a total ass of myself.

I created the “other packages” page for the download section of the getmiro web-site and changed around the download page, too.

I sent an email to Justin at Mozilla in response to his blog entry. I pointed him to the code for the timeline script and the script for migrating data from Trac to Bugzilla.

Looking forward to a Miro 1.1 release with all its libtorrent and CreativeCommons metadata goodness….