Re: [fluid-dev] Tickets, project status, and 1.1.0

[josh]

Hello David,

It is indeed a nice summer here too where I am, which is one of the  
reasons I've been on my computer less as of late :)

Quoting David Henningsson <address@hidden>:
> Hello Fluidsynth community,
>
> I hope that you are enjoying yourselves and have a great summer (or
> winter, or rain period, or whatever depending on where you live :-) ).
> At least it's quite warm in southern Sweden currently!
>
> Anyway, it has not been much activity in the fluid-dev and the code base
> lately. If I remember correctly, the 1.1.0 release was scheduled to be
> released in the end of July or in August, which is a month from now. So
> I think it would be nice if we could sum up how we're progressing.
>
> * A few weeks ago Josh and I discussed how we could improve the thread
> safety inside the synth engine, which Josh volunteered to do. It would
> be nice to know how this is progressing, and if it is scheduled for
> 1.1.0 or not?


Good questions!  I converted a lot of functions over in fluid_synth.c  
to use the thread safe lock free event queue if not called by the  
synthesis thread, as we discussed.  Its not currently buildable  
though, and there is still a bit of work to do (it has started to feel  
a little bit like an overhaul).  I tested things with basic  
note-on/note-off messages through the queue, which worked fine.  I  
think we should try and make FluidSynth 1.1.0 completely thread safe  
(as far as crashes and potential synthesis anomalies).

One user who is building FluidSynth on the iPhone, mentioned that glib  
is not supported currently on that platform.  I started to think that  
we might want to make glib optional for certain platforms.  The iPhone  
seems like a case where building FluidSynth single threaded would be  
OK, which would mean less boiler plate as far as needing to implement  
the thread related functions.  Perhaps Windows might also be a  
candidate for optional glib, though that might be a bit more of a pain  
to maintain.  I'm leaving all glib specific code out of most  
FluidSynth source files and providing simple macro #defines or  
implementations in fluid_sys.c.  I changed g_return_if_fail to  
fluid_return_if_fail for example.

> * We have a number of tickets that are assigned to the 1.1.0 milestone,
> but are yet to be implemented. I guess whether these are fixed before
> 1.1.0 are merely an indication that "it would be nice if this was fixed
> ASAP" rather than an absolute requirement, do you agree?

I agree with the optional nature of the tickets for 1.1.0, it was more  
of a wish list.  I've been spending very little time on programming  
outside of work as of late.  Its been rather apparent to me recently,  
that I shouldn't be on the computer as much as I have been at times!   
It would be great to be able to just work on free software projects  
and make money at it too ;)

I don't think we should rush the release of 1.1.0 at this point  
though, since there aren't a huge amount of features that are being  
held back.  I'd much rather get things right and have a more well  
rounded FluidSynth worthy of the 1.1.0 version bump.

> Coming to speak of tickets, it is currently not obvious to know what
> people are working on and what bugs are looking for volunteers. Here's a
> suggestion:
>
> * If a ticket's status is "assigned", the person listed as "owner" is
> planning to fix it - preferably in the next few weeks.
>
> * If a ticket's status is "new", the person listed as "owner" is
> somewhat thinking of fixing it, or can share some thoughts about it, but
> is not planning to fix it in the near future.
>
> * If a ticket is looking for volunteers, it should be owned by a new
> virtual user called "nobody" or something similar. This should be the
> default for newly created tickets.


As far as I am aware there aren't a whole lot of tasks in progress at  
the moment.  While there may be many tickets assigned to myself, only  
the FluidSynth config file and thread safe event queue tasks are  
currently being worked on by me.  I'm not aware of any other tasks in  
progress.

Others on the list: Please speak up if you are currently working on  
one or more FluidSynth tasks.

The number of developers right now is low enough to where we can  
probably simply communicate about what we are working on.  Anything  
else should be considered up for grabs, but it never hurts to ask and  
make sure someone else isn't already working on it.  I wish Trac had  
the ability to set the ticket back to "unassigned".  Perhaps adding a  
special user, as you suggested, is the best option.  But maybe that is  
overly complicated at the moment and we can just keep track of what  
each person is working on.


> If this is not fine-grained enough, one could write something more
> explicit as a ticket comment.
>
> What do you say?
>
> // David


Thanks for keeping things on track.  I'm going to try and put some  
time into FluidSynth this week and do my best to get something working  
in regards to the thread queue implementation.

Cheers!

Josh Green