[Ardour-Users] 2.7.1 is now feature-frozen / 3.0 development "plan"

[Mark Knecht]

Congrats on making it this far Paul. It's both a great personal
accomplishment and an excellent show of Open Source teamwork.

All the best,
Mark

On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 12:40 PM, Paul Davis <paul at linuxaudiosystems.com> wrote:
>
> Ardour 2.7.1 is now feature frozen. No new features will be added to the
> 2.0-ongoing branch of the program, with the following exceptions:
>
>    1) support for saving & loading AU plugin settings
>    2) (re)use Apple's ExtAudioFile library to allow MP3 and AAC
>         handling on OS X
>    3) minor features that are implemented in 3.0 and can be back-ported
>         to 2.0-ongoing with no code changes
>
> If you are a user with an idea for a new feature, please it in Mantis,
> but do not expect to see it appear in any 2.X release. It is not
> impossible that it may do so, but your expectations of this should be
> low.
>
> Why is this happening?
> ----------------------
>
> The release of 3.0 has been delayed for far too long, primarily by a
> lack of developer hours devoted to advancing its current condition. The
> pressure to get the OS X and SAE versions released led to both myself
> and Nick Mainsbridge (along with other developers possibly following
> both their own itches and our lead) focusing on the 2.0-ongoing branch.
>
> This needs to stop, and almost all developer attention to ardour should
> be directed towards 3.0. The plan is roughly as follows:
>
>    1) Paul finishes up the merge of 2.0-ongoing changes from
>          rev 3890 to rev 4299 into the 3.0 branch
>    2) All hands on deck to start finding bugs in the *audio*
>          part of 3.0. This should include Ardour developers
>          and our leading beta testers, as well as anybody else
>          who wants to join in. The focus will not be on de-novo
>          criticisms of Ardour's audio functionality - we just
>          need to get 3.0 to function as well as 2.7.1 does in
>          the audio realm.
>    3) Once the bug-finding and -fixing is done, I will lead the
>          effort up to a half-dozen substantive features
>          to Ardour 3.0's audio side. These will include:
>
>                * the new "matrix" IO selector
>                * the long-promised overhaul of bus architecture
>                * the ability to work on 2.X sessions without
>                   making them unusable by 2.X ardour versions
>
>    4) While this work goes on, anybody who wants to work on MIDI,
>          either as an alpha-tester or as a developer is welcome
>          to do so.
>
>    5) When (3) is "complete", I would like to collect together
>          information gathered in step (4), and do a comprehensive
>          review & proposal of how the current MIDI editing interface
>          functions. We need to gather together user experience and
>          make sure that the first official release of 3.0 is capable
>          of being easily used to do relatively easy MIDI tasks.
>
>     6) Release 3.0
>
> Once an initial version of 3.0 is released, it will be time for some
> more drastic changes to the codebase. This will likely include things
> like replacing edit groups with named track selections, changes to the
> playlist structures to support linked (soft-copy) regions, region
> grouping, new GUI handling of sends, and last but not least, the
> addition of a language for MIDI manipulation, allowing MIDI "filters" to
> be trivially written by people without C++ backgrounds.
>
> --p
>
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