This is issue #1 of a more or less regular newsletter about what is happening on projects.vdr-developer.org.
How it all began -----------------
Half a month ago, on December 12'th, projects.vdr-developer.org has been launched [1].
The idea to start just another project platform, was born out of a discussion about the VDR Plug-in Survey results [2][3]. These results revealed, that some plug-ins, that haven't seen an update for years and therefore can be considered "orphaned", are still very popular.
Such plug-ins were mostly hold together by patches circulating in forums, mailing lists or distribution packages. This way they were already virtually "community maintained". All that was needed, was a central point to coordinate this community effort somehow.
Git seemed to perfectly fit the way these plug-ins were maintained in some kind of distributed patch driven development. And as a fan of Redmine the decision was quickly made, to host a Redmine project management with Git repositories.
Luckily the Open Source Factory, a German software company using VDR in their product "Xeatre.TV" [4], was currently seeking ways to support the community and was happy to provide a root server. And to kind of "keep things together under one roof", Siegmar Dieser kindly provided the subdomain "projects.vdr-developer.org".
The project is open for everyone, not just for orphaned plug-ins. At the moment, 10 projects and about 30 users are registered.
What we have so far -------------------
It started with three orphaned plug ins, which now have a new home:
- OSDTeletext [5] - TTxtSubs [6] - Text2Skin [7]
They were officially "released" from their original authors, which were happy to see the development continue as a community project. New versions of OSDTeletext and TTxtSubs have already been released.
Thanks to Marcel Wiesweg, Ragnar Sundblad and Sascha Volkenandt for inventing these plug-ins in the first place!
The latest plug-in is TvTv which was taken over from Mario Gross and is now mainly maintained by monty35.
But also some actively maintained projects have found projects.vdr-develper.org to be useful:
- Live [8] - Muggle [9] - The VDR Git Tree [10]
And some new projects have chosen projects.vdr-develper.org as well. Helmut Auer started vdr-channels.conf [11] - a project to manage various VDR channel configurations and distribute them in a nicely organized tarball. If you want to help, just post your channel settings with provider or region info to the projects issue tracker. Jochen Dolze started a project for the InfosatEPG plug-in [12] (without any activity yet).
You want to start your own project? That's easy! ------------------------------------------------
Registering a new project is very easy. All you need to do is:
1. Choose a user name and register an account on projects.vdr-developer.org. In order to register a new project, I kindly ask you to also provide your real name.
2. Create a new issue on the "Project Management" project. Briefly describe, what project you want to be created and how it should be named. If you are adopting an orphaned VDR plug-in, please ask the original author first, if he is ok with this. In order to get write access to the GIT repository, please also attach your public SSH key,
3. As soon as your project is created (which is done manually, so give us at least 48 hour before complaining), you will have full access to it.
Your help is needed: Translators! ---------------------------------
Some plug-ins have incomplete or missing translations. If you want to see a plug-in in your language, clone the git tree or download the po file and create an issue in the issue tracker with the po file or a patch attached.
If you want to keep track of changes to your translations, you can subscribe to an RSS feed of a single po file:
Use the GitWeb interface [13] to browse the project tree, select the translation file and on the lower left you have two buttons that link to an RSS or ATOM feed to this translation.
E.g. to subscribe to the RSS feed of the Spanish translation of the OSDTeletext plug-in, use this URL:
http://projects.vdr-developer.org/git/?p=vdr-plugin-osdteletext.git;a=rss;f=...
Your help is needed: Users! ---------------------------
Please report any problems, feature requests or suggestions to the projects issue tracker. There's no need to register as a user, you can very well create new issues anonymously (but then will not get email updates on your reported issues).
Make sure, you verified any problems with the latest available version and try to give as much details as possible. The better your instructions to recreate a problem are, the more likely it will be fixed!
You can attach files to your reports and you can come back any time to add additional comments.
Your help is needed: Developers! --------------------------------
Although each project has a "Manager" which has certain responsibilities, it's up to *YOU* to get things fixed / implemented.
The easiest way is to use Git to create patches and post them to the projects issue tracker or ask to become a member of the project with push access to the repository.
Currently help is needed especially for the following issues:
vdr-plugin-osdteletext [16] [17]:
This is about OSDTeletext forcing VDR into transfer mode, even if this is not really necessary. Klaus pointed out, that this needs to be fixed in VDR and is related to a bugfix from VDR 1.3.8 for "Live TV freeze when recording starts normal" [14].
Udo Richter provided a small patch, which helps to analyse the problem [15].
A solution is needed, which fixes the problem with "Live TV freeze when recording starts normal" from VDR < 1.3.8 with out making OSDTeletext forcing VDR into transfer mode.
vdr-plugin-text2skin:
Currently no work has been done on vdr-plugin-text2kin. There's an issue for including the patch from chr13 [18], but there probably needs to be done a lot more to this plugin. If you have any patches / improvements / whatever, please just post them to the projects issue tracker.
If you can dedicate some more time to this plug-in, you can become it's manager. A project managers responsibility is mainly to integrate patches, keep an eye on the reported issues, make new releases and "recruite" developers, if needed.
vdr-plugin-ttxtsubs [19];
"If there's a two rows of subtitles, the upper row is corrupted with FF card when using antialiasing. Without antialiasing, both rows of text are just fine."
Patches are welcome!
That's it for today! I hope to see you contributing to projects.vdr-developer.org soon!
Tobias
[1] http://www.linuxtv.org/pipermail/vdr/2008-December/018767.html [2] http://e-tobi.net/blog/2008/11/18/vdr-plugin-survey-2008-results-part-1 [3] http://e-tobi.net/blog/2008/12/02/vdr-plugin-survey-2008-results-part-2 [4] http://www.xeatre.tv/ [5] http://projects.vdr-developer.org/projects/show/plg-osdteletext [6] http://projects.vdr-developer.org/projects/show/plg-ttxtsubs [7] http://projects.vdr-developer.org/projects/show/plg-text2skin [8] http://projects.vdr-developer.org/projects/show/plg-live [9] http://projects.vdr-developer.org/projects/show/plg-muggle [10] http://projects.vdr-developer.org/projects/show/vdr [11] http://projects.vdr-developer.org/projects/show/vdr-channels [12] http://projects.vdr-developer.org/projects/show/plg-infosatepg [13] http://projects.vdr-developer.org/git/ [14] http://linuxtv.org/mailinglists/vdr/2004/05-2004/msg00115.html [15] http://projects.vdr-developer.org/issues/show/10#note-5 [16] http://projects.vdr-developer.org/issues/show/9 [17] http://projects.vdr-developer.org/issues/show/10 [18] http://projects.vdr-developer.org/issues/show/39 [19] http://projects.vdr-developer.org/issues/show/24