[Rosegarden-user] Rosegarden 10.02-ALPHA released

[D. M. M. <mic...@ro...>]

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