[SIP-devel] Developers needed

[Ricardo F. <rf...@gm...>]

Hi, all,

I know it has been quite a long time without any news, sorry.
We are in need of an new active developer/administrator for SIP. If
you are interested please sign up to the developers mailing list and
present yourself.  I am not leaving SIP development, but will help
manage it and participate.

Unfortunately, since I moved to the USA I could not find any time to
significantly work on SIP. The main reason is that I have not been
using Scilab for my own research, so there is no way I could spare
time for it. I like my new research group very much, but they don't
rely on Scilab as much as my old group.  So it is a very slow process
to get them to know it and eventually use it.

We currently work with C++ using http://vxl.sf.net for image
processing. Since C++ is way more time-consuming to program than
Scilab for most numerical computing, I am trying to convince people
(specially my advisor) to take a glance at Scilab.  And in the process
I have to tell them why Scilab and not Matlab, the advantages of open
source, etc. It would be nice to gather stories of Matlab to Scilab
migration around the world, and how to convince people to do it. One
thing people always complain is that Scilab is not GPL. People are
very paranoid about this. I was informed that Scilab 4.0 is planned to
have a new license, GPL or LGPL. That is very good news. (it is taking
long because some code is having to be rewritten to be
GPL-compatible).

Anyway, I am currently only passively supporting the SIP Unix SOURCE
version.  The rest I simply cannot touch for now. I've been extremely
busy, and finally realized I am going to be like this at least for the
near future.  I just cannot do everything (home page, binary packages,
documentation, review contributions, give support, etc).

Frankly it is quite hard to achieve the same level of quality and
productivity we used to have in SIP a year ago. We need a careful
solution that guarantees no loss of quality. On the other hand the
project cannot be stalled forever.

Recently, I was asked:

> We really need to have a Windows version of SIP for Scilab 3.0 and
> more. Do you plan to have one?

I started one but cannot finalize it myself, at least for the next few
months. Whenever I work on SIP it is either for support (of the unix
version) or for actual coding of image processing and writing
documentation. I was able to port SIP for windows using MinGW
(www.mingw.org). It actually works, but requires so many tricks and
hacks, that I did not have time to find a way to actually make a
windows install executable that would smoothly install on all windows
versions (from 95 to XP). Each windows version needs its own tweaks
for e.g.  locating DLLs and imagemagick configuration files. As I
don't program nor use windows, it is hard to find time for this.

Anyway, I have detailed documentation on my (hacky) windows port and
can provide it for anybody upon request. I might soon provide a
webpage on this.

best regards,
--
Ricardo Fabbri

PhD Student in Computer Engineering / Computer Vision
LEMS - Laboratory for Engineering Man-Machine Systems
Brown University, USA


--=20
Ricardo Fabbri

PhD Student in Computer Engineering / Computer Vision
LEMS - Laboratory for Engineering Man-Machine Systems
Brown University, USA