From: D. M. M. <mic...@ro...> - 2009-11-14 08:58:36
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Today marks the formal end of the porting phase of development. The port is over, and now it is time to concentrate on getting this thing stabilized, released, and into the world. The final release of Rosegarden 10.02, codename "Thorn", is scheduled for 14 February 2010. This is an _UNSTABLE_ ALPHA technology demonstration release, and nothing more than a development snapshot that has been pre-bootstrapped, so it has a configure script ready to go. It has some very serious bugs, and is by no means even beta worthy, but I decided to get this party started by jumping right off a cliff. If all goes well, you will experience more crashes than usual, and find a lot of bugs, but if you tread lightly, you can probably get through a small project. I have, although I'll admit it wasn't pretty. (TIP: leave autosave turned on!) Please report any bugs (check the wiki first) to rosegarden-devel, or note them on the wiki bug tracker at: http://rosegardenmusic.com/wiki/dev:qt4_bug_tracker Please DO NOT file them on the SourceForge bug tracker. Not just yet. We'll open the tracker when we get further along in this process. The alpha release is here (at a regrettably long URL): https://sourceforge.net/projects/rosegarden/files/rosegarden-10.02- alpha.tar.bz2/download Testing Procedure ----------------- DO NOT TRY THIS ON A PRODUCTION SYSTEM! YOU WERE WARNED! The next release (probably a second alpha) will have an install target that renames the binary to rosegarden-$VERSION so it will be possible to stack up a whole pile of them in /usr/bin, but I just thought of that. The new Rosegarden will quite happily coexist with an installation of "Classic" and any number of builds of itself, but that won't work properly until I adjust the install target. This release WILL overwrite /usr/bin/rosegarden! 1. Temporarily remove any distro package of Rosegarden 2. Download and unpack the tarball 3. cd rosegarden-10.02-ALPHA/ 4. ./configure --prefix=/usr && make && sudo make install (If your distro uses something other than /usr, please substitute that instead, but I do want you to try installing to the same location where eventual distro packages will install, and not to /usr/local. We need to field test the install target. Don't try this on a production system!) There is a list of build dependencies started on this page: http://rosegardenmusic.com/wiki/dev:contributing#prepare_the_build_environment Please help me finish that table. I will probably pull all of that onto some other build dependency page by itself, but editing it there will do for now. I want to make a completely exhaustive list of every last dependency required, so there is no further room for head scratching and wondering what's required. (We've always done a shoddy job of this, and I want to get it right this time, and forever after.) Once you get it built and installed (I'm hoping)... 5. Open your favorite graphical file browser 6. Go to rosegarden-10.02-ALPHA/data/templates Does your templates/ directory look something like the attached screenshot? 7. Go to data/examples Does your examples/ directory look something like the attached screenshot? 8. Go to data/library Does your library/ directory look something like the attached screenshot? 9. Open your desktop menu Does Rosegarden appear with the correct icon? Is it under Applications -> Multimedia? These are the main procedural questions I'd like to get answers for from the early adopters brave enough to play with this. (You should of course play with the thing and try it out, cautiously, but I'm not going to get into that sort of testing procedure yet.) I had to write a new install target entirely from scratch, and I'm a strict KDE user. It works fine under KDE on my carefully controlled development box, but I'd like to hear about GNOME and any other desktops people might be running. As I recall (it was almost a year ago now) I did test this on GNOME, and it was quirky, but maybe I'm lucky enough that something ironed itself out without further intervention in the months since, and all the MIME-related icons and the menu entry are working properly. Also worth noting, right after I ran make install to /usr on my own system, Konqueror forgot how to open URLs with itself. I don't know if that was coincidence, or a harbinger of something awful to follow. (Remember, DO NOT TRY THIS ON A PRODUCTION SYSTEM!) OK then, let's see how it goes. I've taken away a few things already that I will concentrate on, and I expect to follow up with another alpha not too far behind this one. Really, it's almost pointless to bother rolling tarballs at this stage, but I think it might be the thing to do to get some momentum up, and I hope it's worth the bother. Good luck! -- D. Michael McIntyre |