Roadmap

[dotnick]

Is there blog somewhere that someone writes to on the current status of the 8.04 release.  I'm really happy with the 7.10 and am looking forward to the next best thing.  It would be nice for us fans (with very little technical expertise) to see the status of the fun new stuff going to into LinuxMCE.  Keep up the good work.

[Enigmus]

I second this request.  Is there one out there, or where can we get this information?

[Monkgs]

You are free to follow the development progress, which is conversed about in the Development forum. Additional information can be found under the development section of the wiki.

If you want to try your hand at the latest beta there are instructions in the wiki on how to download and compile it.

[tschak909]

Guys,

sorry, it _HAS_ been rather quiet lately, we've been dealing with a variety of issues of coordinating development amongst our own community, and the commercial entities which also work in our trunk.

We do have a small development roadmap in the wiki, however, we do need to expand things quite a bit...

Zaerc and Danielk22 have been hard at work building our various branches, trying to work out bugs in the charon-merge build system, and trying out the results on the 0804 tree that we've had in svn.

Our first priority at this moment, is fixing a variety of regressions that have been happening in trunk as a result of engineering direction changes at Pluto, and figuring out how to deal with these issues. Keep in mind, we are also sharing a database with the commercial entities, and that the schema, data, and code are tightly locked together, so changes in any of the three can cause breakages in the resulting build. These are very difficult problems to deal with, and they were here long before we ever got here.

Next priority, as soon as we get the builds working stably, to finish the remaining planned features on the roadmap for 0810. There are a number of things on the horizon, and we really need developer help to get some of these done, it really is a question of man-power.

I also have queuing up, an update for the Cisco 7970 Orbiters, doing a massive amount of Designer changes, and Proxy Orbiter code changes to make the orbiter usable. It has been in testing now for a couple of weeks, and I will start now to push it out to the general public.

Again, sorry for being so quiet, we've just got a lot on our hands at the moment. If anyone can help, please help.

-Thom

[jondecker76]

I have a small list of things I want to finish for the next release as well. I've been waiting for the merge to finish before putting too much time into it though.. The thought of working in 2 separate branches and trying to manage things doesn't appeal to me, not to mention that re-compiling many things from the charon-merge branch on a 0710 build tends to break things - so once the merge is finished I'll get back to work on adding (features I want done for the next release):
-CM11A X10 fixes/optimizations
-Support for different Dimming modes supported by X10 switches (DIrect dim modes)
-Climate and Lighting plugin enhancements
-Floorplan enhancements
-Toggle Power/Input IR bugs
-Tons of web admin bugs (already done)

I wish there were a cleaner way to start back up working on these now, but again working around the merge is tricky, and being short on time anyways makes it even trickier

[LuckyDog]

I am new to this blog but I have been following your wonderful efforts for a long time. As a computer/network technician for the past 20 years, I am well aware of all of the hours of development time that you have into this project. I wish I had the required programming skills to help out. I am new to Linux, having purposely avoided it all of these years. As a somewhat obsessive compulsive techno geek I tend to get lost in projects and I have been reluctant to involve myself with Linux lest I become lost and am never heard from again. Maybe being found dead hunched over a keyboard with a stuffed penguin clutched in my hand.

Anyway, after researching home control software for several/many years I have decided to go with LMCE. I have a huge task before me, integrating all of the various systems installed in my house into a unified control server so I was wondering when the next/latest version is projected to be finished? From what I have read on this thread, I sounds like things are proceeding apace and could be concluding soon. I know that this sounds rather ungracious of me (for a newbie) but believe me when I say that the amount of computer equipment I have to load and debug is more than insignificant. Before I am through I will more than likely be diving into the developers section to try my hand at adding to this amazing work, in some capacity.

Thanks and I will be seeing you around here frequently.

LuckyDog

[Monkgs]

Somewhere on that list we need an admin site rewrite. It's pretty bad, and that's being nice about it.

[domotiqa.com]

I guys, I really think you have to put a sticky thread like: need developpers !!
and maybe ask for task in each reply !
Another point, in my mind, I'm maybe not the best programmers, however, I know, C, C++, VB, java, php, css, some shell scripts, little perl, hardware conception/arch... and I really thing that getting involved in lmce is hard, hard, hard (in time)!!

In my case I'm creating a new company, so it take me lot's of time and to be involved, I really need to read hundred of doc... the developper thread looks like... poor... no easy step...

So I guess lmce could be more efficient with this kind of "programmers doc for dummies" !
All of guru like hary, tschak... know tricks, arch... of lmce and have

[colinjones]

I took me quite a while and piecing things together to get the basic messaging architecture straight in my head, what I think would be an enormous help (to me, as well as others) is a functional block document that describes in detail what responsibility each device and plugin has in terms of the messages they send and receive. For instance, the Media Plugin vs Orbiter - one a device the other a plugin, which is responsible for exactly what task (message) when starting some media? From the very shaky impression I get, the Orbiter is responsible for querying the database, populating the datagrids, accepting selections from the user, etc, then communicates with the media plugin which creates stream handles, and fires the messages that tell the xine_wrapper device to play the peice of media. But exactly what the steps are and where the demarcation lines are, are beyond me at this point. There are plenty of other examples of these interactions where I am no clear on which piece of code does what...

I think if this was more clear and spelt out, it would inspire people more to get involved (esp as it wouldn't be quite so awe-inspiring trying to determine which piece of code to start looking at when searching for a bug!) Just a thought...

[Zaerc]

There is a hardy based (alpha) test release available.  No guarantees, use at your own risk! http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Hardy-iglu

[domotiqa.com]

great news

[indulis]

Just wanted to add my thanks to the people developing LMCE and donating their time to these forums/WIKIs.

You guys should set up something like the http://www.getmiro.com/ Miro guys have done to collect recurring donations.  This was easy to subscribe to, and you could use it to say fund some purchases for new equipment. Or beer :-)

And if you haven't tried Miro, it is worth a look, and would be (I think) a prime candidate for integration as it is written to be skinned (mozilla code base).  Try the www.tikibartv.com feed, that is a hoot!

[tschak909]

We won't integrate Miro or the like as such, however...

There has been major work in the media subsystem below to eventually support feedable media from other sources such as Youtube and RSS. We still need to do the individual handlers and Orbiter code, but the infrastructure is in place. (Thank you aaron.b!)

So the end result will be a lot more integrated.

-Thom

[padrino]

We won't integrate Miro or the like as such, however...

There has been major work in the media subsystem below to eventually support feedable media from other sources such as Youtube and RSS. We still need to do the individual handlers and Orbiter code, but the infrastructure is in place. (Thank you aaron.b!)

So the end result will be a lot more integrated.

-Thom

I do not think the intent of mentioning Miro was to indicate what it does.

I think the previous poster was alluding more to how Miro makes pushing donations to them easy so people are more apt to provide dollars to help fund hardware/development.

[tschak909]

ah okay, my bad.

Yes, that would be a very cool idea

-Thom