On Sun, Aug 31, 2008 at 2:43 PM, Ge Wang
Greetings again, Kassen and Steve!
First of all, huge thank you's for all you've done for ChucK and friends!
I've really been enjoying hacking on Chuck lately. ;) I find it pretty interesting to see how someone else has attacked the problem of writing a language for real-time, sample-accurate audio with dynamic behaviour and a complete VM. I hope I'm able to contribute something useful to the effort as ChucK makes a great alternative for me to the graphically oriented audio tools like Pd. Thanks for writing it! And I'm really happy you seem to be interested in continuing it even after finishing your thesis. ;-) I would fully understand the desire to leave such a big project behind after an effort like that, at least for a few months of brain-rest. But all the more reason to encourage others to take on the new challenges!
But I'm currently a bit confused whether the ChucK devs actually read and use this list, since there is obviously work being done on ChucK but I see no information about it, and no one responded to my patch. If not, I'm just wondering if there's a more appropriate place to discuss ChucK development or to at least submit patches.
This is a great point. We haven't been using this list as much as would be helpful. Things have certainly been a bit crazy for everyone these last few months. I just got back from ICMC in Belfast, and a week before that Beijing. Others have had fairly crazy schedules as well.
Of course ICMC must have been crazy.. ;-) and Beijing too, no doubt! I guess some people here at McGill have just gotten back from that too, I'll have to ask how it was.. Sorry for being whiny about my patch, I waited a week before complaining.. ;-) I find in open source, sometimes a little nudge helps get people over the "hump" of getting around to examining patches and bug fixing.. I'll continue to use this list as I think a mailing list is a great way to send patches and generally communicate about development, but for this very reason I was just a little surprised at the lack of mail lately. ICMC is a perfectly good excuse of course.. ;-)
Still, it's my suspicion that if more time would be spend on open communication then that would make it easier to share the work (not just coding but also documentation, finding bugs and documenting them, answering questions, etc, etc, etc), thus decreasing the load on some individuals. Right now I am contributing a bit but I could do more (and have fun doing it) if we could improve comunication. I'd be happy to try my hand at fixing Sitar, for example, but it's not at all clear to me how Sitar should deal with very low notes (clearly not by outputting text warnings at sample-rate, which is the current behaviour). I'd also be happy to help write the manual but it's not at all clear to me in what form I should donate paragraphs or small sections.
Hear hear! I agree with all of this. At the moment, I honestly don't know how to effectively fix this, but please know that I genuinely want to. Feedback in this forum, despite lack of responses from me, have been extremely helpful. We'll need to come up with ways to submit patches, doc's, examples, etc... Working on it, though slowly!
Well, one way might be to take advantage of services like sourceforge which provide all these things. Not necessarily SF of course, since not everyone likes it. (Personally i don't mind it, though it's sometimes slow.) My preference is to make use of the mailing list instead of or in addition to a patch tracker, but either way some way of tracking these things is always helpful. Submitting patches against a specific CVS date is pretty much equivalent to sending a tarball. The nice thing about including patches directly in an email is that you can look at them (at least short ones) critically before even trying to compile and test. Another option would be to install something like Trac or Redmine on the web server, but it's a lot more work to administer something like that yourself. I've said it before, but a great way to deal with looking at other people's development trees is to use git (along with gitorious.org or repo.or.cz for hosting), which allows someone to do all sorts of development and then tell the mailing list, 'hey, look I added this feature, come grab it'. That way everyone takes care of their own source repository, and you can easily grab the good parts from what other people are working on when they are ready. (While retaining authorship credits, etc.) I'm currently using git to track the chuck CVS which makes it much easier to port my changes to the latest version. cheers, Steve