novacut-community team mailing list archive

[Jason Gerard DeRose <jderose@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'd first like thank everyone, all 802 of you, who backed us on
Kickstarter<http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/novacut/novacut-pro-video-editor>,
and everyone who helped spread the word. And I'd like to thank those who
supported us earlier via PayPal: you gave us the benefit of the doubt back
when there was less reason to do so. We feel extremely lucky to be able to
keep working on Novacut full-time.
Meet our release process

As this is our first release day since Kickstarter, I figure it's a great
time to introduce the many newcomers to our release process.

We do monthly, time-based releases<https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TimeBasedReleases>.
Realistically, a software project can only make a commitment to either *what
* features will be released, or *when* a release is made. From observing
other projects, and from personal experience, I feel a commitment to
*when*is far more productive, so that's what we do with Novacut.

The way to manage time-based releases (without things becoming stressful) is
to keep the trunk branches always in a high-quality, releasable state. This
helps keep everyone productive as developers aren't slowed down by bugs in
the trunk as they work on new features. And new features are only merged to
the trunk once they have good test coverage and have reached an acceptable
quality level.

For a highly user-focused project like Novacut, time-based releases are
great because we never go more than a month without getting a new stable
release into our users' hands. This means we can't get too far off track
before our users give us a reality check. Actually, as we do automatic daily
builds throughout the month, those adventurous enough to use our daily
builds PPA <https://launchpad.net/%7Enovacut/+archive/daily> wont let us go
more than 24 hours without a reality check.
New YY.MM version scheme

Those who having been following things for a while are probably surprised by
the *11.08* version number. I mean, wasn't this supposed to be the belated
dmedia *0.8* release? Nope, we turned things up to eleven.

Hehe. Okay, a more serious explanation: We're building Novacut as a
collection of simple, focused components. For example,
novacut<https://launchpad.net/novacut>builds on
dmedia <https://launchpad.net/dmedia>, which builds on
filestore<https://launchpad.net/filestore>.
As things are moving so quickly, there will be API changes between the
layers fairly often. So for example, a given month's dmedia release will
require that same month's filestore release.

Rather than having to remember that dmedia 0.9 requires filestore 0.2, I
decided to go with a common *YY.MM* (year and month) version scheme used
across all the components. So next month, dmedia *11.09* will require
filestore *11.09*, and so on.
What's new in the 11.08 components

For the end user, this release is still boring and rather useless. Sorry,
nothing shiny for you to play with just yet! There should be *some* shinny
next month, and substantial shinny in the 11.10 release.

However, for developers 11.08 is a quite exciting release. For one, this is
the first release of the novacut component
<https://launchpad.net/novacut>itself, which did its first video
renders <http://vimeo.com/groups/novacutartistdiaries/videos/27479209>earlier
this month. This also marks the first release of
filestore <https://launchpad.net/filestore> as a stand-alone component,
which includes the new Skein-based <http://www.skein-hash.info/> dmedia
hashing protocol.

Packages are available for Ubuntu Natty and Oneiric in the Novacut Stable
Releases PPA <https://launchpad.net/%7Enovacut/+archive/stable>. And you can
download the source tarballs here:

   - novacut-11.08.0.tar.gz<https://launchpad.net/novacut/trunk/11.08/+download/novacut-11.08.0.tar.gz>
   - dmedia-11.08.0.tar.gz<https://launchpad.net/dmedia/trunk/11.08/+download/dmedia-11.08.0.tar.gz>
   - filestore-11.08.0.tar.gz<https://launchpad.net/filestore/trunk/11.08/+download/filestore-11.08.0.tar.gz>
   - microfiber-0.2.0.tar.gz<https://launchpad.net/microfiber/trunk/0.2/+download/microfiber-0.2.0.tar.gz>

Special thanks

This release wouldn't be possible without the hard work and expertise of the
following people:

   - Thanks to Hagen Fürstenau
<http://www1.ccls.columbia.edu/%7Ehagen/>(the friendly author of
   PySkein <http://packages.python.org/pyskein/>) for reviewing the dmedia
   hashing protocol<http://bazaar.launchpad.net/%7Edmedia/filestore/trunk/view/head:/filestore.py#L35>early
on, which corrected a slew of silly things I was doing
   - Thanks to David Green <https://launchpad.net/%7Edavid4dev> for
   improving the dmedia-cli
tool<https://bugs.launchpad.net/dmedia/+bug/759195>,
   and for jumping into some hardcore dmedia schema
work<https://bugs.launchpad.net/dmedia/+bug/714941>that will land in
next month's release
   - Thanks to Michael Chang <https://twitter.com/#%21/cbhl> for improving
   the Debian packaging of
filestore<https://bugs.launchpad.net/filestore/+bug/822413>and
   microfiber <https://bugs.launchpad.net/microfiber/+bug/823288> so that
   the unit tests are run during our daily builds
   - Thanks to David Jordan <https://twitter.com/#%21/DMJordan2> for helping
   me work through some key schema design issues for the editor
   - Thanks to James Raymond <https://twitter.com/#%21/jamesmraymond> for
   busily researching for the next round of UI prototypes, and for working on
   some *highly* shiny things to be unveiled soon

Contribute to 11.09 and beyond!

Want your name in next month's release notes like all the cool kids above?
If you look at the *Jump in* section on this
page<https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Novacut>,
you'll see a link to the *Bitesize Bugs* for each component. These are bugs
that should (in theory) require little coding, but will get you familiar
with the Launchpad workflow, running the unit tests, and, importantly, get
your name in the release notes.

We always release on the last Thursday of the month. The 11.09 components
will be released on Thursday September 29 2011, and development is already
underway. To see what's in store for the next releases, checkout the 11.09
milestones:

   - novacut 11.09 <https://launchpad.net/novacut/+milestone/11.09>
   - dmedia 11.09 <https://launchpad.net/dmedia/+milestone/11.09>
   - filestore 11.09 <https://launchpad.net/filestore/+milestone/11.09>
   - microfiber 11.09 <https://launchpad.net/microfiber/+milestone/11.09>

That's all, folks!

Thanks to everyone who is helping make this dream a reality!
Cheers,
Jason Gerard DeRose <http://twitter.com/#%21/jgderose>