knocte :: MonoTema

OMG, I should feel embarrassed about posting such a belated blog post (yes, the hackfest was more than 6 months ago), but oh well, at least I can say I have enough excuses:

• I got my house refurbished in the last months, which has been such a long planning endeavour, and a real stressful PITA while it was being done.
• Before the above started, and after it was finished, I had to move, so that's 2 moves! (I hate moving)
• I've been kind of busy in regards to Gnome-related contributions: we released Banshee 2.6.2, GStreamer-Sharp 0.99.0, Banshee 2.9.1, and a big etcetera (including pre-mentoring for GSoC! more about that in a subsequent post).

So this doesn't leave enough room for blogging, which is a necessary but a less appealing task. But I have to say it somewhere: the hackfest that David Nielsen organized was amazing, the best kind I have attended so far, as I came to meet for the first time some awesome hackers such as him, and:

• Hylke Bons, sparkleshare creator, Red Hat designer.
• Mirco Bauer, smuxi creator and debian developer (mono packager).
• Jo Shields, debian developer (mono packager), Collabora sysadmin.
• Robert Nordan, Pinta contributor.
• Jared Jennings, Tomboy contributor.
• Stephen Shaw, ex-Novell coworker (build developer), and currently at Xamarin. (Yes, I was Stephen's team-mate when at Novell, but had never met him in person!)
• Stefan Hammer, Tomboy contributor and hackfest local-host.
• Timo Dörr, Tomboy and Banshee contributor, GSoC student.
• Stephan Sundermann, GSoC student for GStreamerSharp and Bindinator.

(BTW I didn't include the awesome Bertrand Lorentz, fellow Banshee co-maintainer and GtkSharp gatekeeper, in the list, because I had already met him before, it wasn't my first time!).

And it was with the latter Stephan (not Stefan) the one I ended up spending more time with, because we decided to work on the new GStreamerSharp bindings since the 2nd day of the hackfest (the 1st day I mainly worked with Bertrand to release Banshee 2.9.0, our first Gtk3 compatible release, which he already blogged about).

So what was special about this work?

• GStreamerSharp 0.10.x releases were not compatible with GStreamer 1.x releases, so this had to be fixed soon. However, much of the architecture of this old version of the bindings used many manually crafted binding code.
• Stephan, by using the new Bindinator (a GObjectIntrospection metadata parser that outputs GAPI metadata, that allows generating .NET bindings, created by Andreia Gaita) in his GSoC, created a better foundation for the new bindings.
• He targetted GI metadata from GStreamer 1.0 and 1.2 versions (the jump from 0.10 to 1.0 was a big and not easy leap, since lots of APIs were modified and deprecated).
• We needed to polish them enough to make Banshee be able to consume them without glitches.

"Polish" sounds like easy work, but it wasn't. We fixed lots of crashes, and we contributed fixes to GObject-Introspection metadata upstream. And we proposed big patches for the gtk-sharp GAPI generator. And of course we updated our Banshee managed playback backend to the new GStreamerSharp API.

Main kudos should go to him though. I mainly added Banshee expertise, gtk-sharp contributing expertise, and lots of motivation (or at least I thought).

We had a big success: a Banshee playing audio with GStreamerSharp. Unfortunately video playback was freezing. But some months later after the hackfest we fixed it, and we released first GStreamerSharp 1.0 preview, which we called "0.99.0", and we released the first Banshee release that depends on this work: 2.9.1.

And it was my first time in Austria (and in Vienna). Overall a great experience, and I need to mention our awesome sponsors:

Labels: General, Gnome, Mono, Programacion, SoftwareLibre