This is a **preview release** — Lumiera is not usable yet.
Publication was again motivated by a series of major upgrades and clean-up.
Compilation now requires C++23 and Debian/Trixie is considered the reference
platform. The GUI is connected to the core over an asynchronous messaging
bus and the timeline display has been reshaped to accommodate flexibly
nested structures of media content, instructed by the session through
a series of _diff messages_. A scheduler has been implemented to drive
the Render Engine, but the connection to the player and UI for output
is yet unfinished.
- comb through the Website, starting at the frontpage
- add a **news** entry to confirm this major upgrade step (C++23)
- improve the wording in various overview pages
- adapt the ''release checklist'' to align it with **git-flow**
- reorganise the image folder(s) on the website
- the animated beating heart is back ;-)
On the Website, there is a set of interconnected pages related
to compiling from source, the Debian package and our DEB depot.
Although these pages have always been superficially kept up-to-date,
the overall presentation feels dated and generally not well organized.
During the last weeks, I have almost entirely rewritten all those pages,
added information about the (now reworked) DEB package, explained the
alternate ways to build from a Debian source package (notably the
`mk-build-deps` for handling the build dependencies, which effectively
the only method which always worked during the last years, since our
DEB package was totally outdated)
Furthermore, I have tested most of the build steps with the current
source trees, repositories and package definition, and finally I
have also updated and polished the front-page of our DEB-Depot
(-> see commit on the depot-Branch)
Wheew ... quite some work done!
Many versions enforced with this changeset are chosen such
as to support Ubuntu/Noble (24.04) and otherwise use versions
reasonably close to Debian-Trixie (≙reference-platform)
Since we now require a fairly modern compiler for C++23,
I have added now an explicit version check, which however
is performed only if the defined compiler is named `g++*`
Furthermore, I combed through all of our build tutorials and documentation pages
and updated a lot of information regarding dependencies and build practices...
* Simplify some constructs from the Python-3 migration
* update copyright, since I did maintain the SCons build continuosly
* remove unused method from Buildhelper
Furthermore, the documentation page for our build system
https://lumiera.org/documentation/technical/build/SCons.html
has been reworked, to add a synopsis, some further background
information about the internal structure of SCons and about
the specific conventions and definitions used for Lumiera
Some recherche regarding the requirements and conditions of the GPL
made it clear that we are obliged to have at least an summary statement
of all authors and the years of their contributions embedded somewhere
in the source itself. The Git history alone is not sufficient to fulfil
this requirement, since a code base could be packaged as Tarball
and passed-on outside of any Git repository.
Thus I propose the following policy
- add yourself to the copyright header whenever you made
some ''significant'' contribution to a code file
- maintain a list of relevant authors at top-level,
indicating a time range of their contribution
- use the same information also in the debian/copyright (DEB package)
- clarify in the LICENSE that authorship can be extracted from Git
__Remark__: Anton Yakovlev made a single code contribution in 2009 (87e528bd),
which was never used anywhere and removed as part of a general clean-up in 2023.
Thus I do not list him as a code author, but he is mentioned in credits.txt
...and split-out the description of preview-releases,
since that rather belongs into some kind of changelog (NEWS).
Furthermore, check the links to the build dependencies
Debian-Docbase allows to register some HTML documentation;
My old package definition added placeholder config, which renders
the documentation configuration invalid (as pointed out by Lintian).
However, I still think it is a good idea to have the anchor point
already defined, and thus I came up with the idea of in fact
providing some usable placeholder content...
As it turns out, we also have a placeholder page at the Lumiera website,
where the User Manual is assumed to be located later — so why not extend
this one and then provide the HTML-rendering for the DEB package?
To allow for this setup
* I have now extended the placeholder page for the Website
to include some generic description about Lumiera (from the 'about' page)
* Furthermore, I added the screenshot (from the »Outer Space« page)
* and I use this a an opportunity to document the various test / demo
facilities currently available in the GUI, since these are rather obscure.
While only intended for the developer, it seems still worthwhile
to describe the possible effects — it may well be that we retain
some of that test/demo functionality and in that case, we have
now already some starting point for a documentation
* Then, to include that page as stand-alone HTML, I used the 'Print Edit WE'-plugin
from Firefox, to encode the images as inline-base64 URLs (which are restored
by a tiny JavaScript embedded into that page)
* and last but not least, our SCons buildsystem needs the ability
to install such a documentation file, since it seems most adequate
to handle this requirement as part of the generic installation (and
not hidden in some Debian scripting)
- reorganise the navigation tab structure
- place all further index lists into a common "Index" tab
- include a list of concepts
- remove the various "member" sub-tabs, these are not helpful
- the "modules" tab is now called "topics" (since C++ has now Modules!)
- generally re-sync DoxygenLayout.xml with a current pristine template
- comb though the Doxygen Warnings and fix a lot of small problems
The »Outer Space« and »Inner Core« documents present a comprehensive
overview of the vision, architecture and essential parts of the implementation.
In the light of changes to policy, design and implementation approaches,
some updates were necessary to align these crucial texts with the current
state of planning and implementation. Notably I have added a recent Screenshot
of the UI, showing a nested track structure pushed up by Diff from the core.
Over the last weeks, I conducted an extended analysis of the inception time
of the Lumiera project, which gave me a sharpened understanding of the goals,
going forward. I have also written an in-depth essay "Complexity and Flexibility".
See the corresponding commits in the Website repository.
The RfC documents were written to complement discussions of the Lumiera developers;
yet since the time where ''Ichthyo'' is working basically alone on the project,
this kind of discussions have ceased. During the following years, some ideas
promoted by the existing RfC documents became rather detached from the
actual state of development in the code base.
Many of the existing RfC documents require some commentary to place them
into context, and some of the decisions taken in the early stage of the
project should be **re-assessed**. This includes the decision to reject
some proposals, which initially might have seemed desirable, yet could not
be reconciled with the understanding of the matter and topic in question,
as was gained through the ongoing analysis and development.
The purpose of RfCs is to channel and document discussions
among a group of developers regarding questions of design.
While there is unfortunately no longer a group of developers
discussing matters and working together on the code base,
some questions can be considered more or less settled,
by being implemented and validated.
- the Scheduler
- structure of the Developer Documentation
- Application installation as relocatable bundle
Some sections of the Lumiera website document meeting minutes,
discussion protocols and design proposals from the early days
of the project; these pages were initially authored in the
»Moin Moin Wiki« operated by Cehteh on pipapo.org at that time;
this wiki backed the first publications of the »Cinelerra-3«
initiative, which turned into the Lumiera project eventually.
Some years later, those pages were transliterated into Asciidoc
semi-automatically, resulting in a lot of broken markup and links.
This is a long standing maintenance problem problem plaguing the
Lumiera website, since those breakages cause a lot of warnings
and flood the logs of any linkchecker run.
- indicate clearly that a ''past discussion'' is documented here
- point out what is the primary focus for UI design ''currently''
- arrange some links better
- use cross-links / Linkfarm; especially cross-link to
the discussion regarding Wouter's Workflow proposals (2025)
Create a new subcategory "design/architecture/time"
and rearrange several pages related to time handling and time codes.
NOTE: starting with this changeset, a ''Link-Farm'' is required for cross-links;
since we don't have an automatic solution for this task yet, I have created
the necessary forwarding pages manually in the website repository.
...fine-tuned a few small bits here and there in the
current chapter of the workflow document
===========================================================
Remark from Ichthyo(committer):
Converted from PDF to raw text with
pdftotext wouter250819v3.pdf WorkflowProposals.txt
Images extracted with:
pdfimages -png -j wouter250819v3.pdf wouter/wouter250819v3
Again adding the images separately to the Website-repository,
in order to save storage space in the main repository....
- add markup to match formatting from PDF
- link to the images extracted into the website Git-repository
- adjust image sizes to fit into the text
- add some cross references
(incidentally: TimelineDiscussion.txt -- store image locally)
Chapter 2 (about the timeline) is now complete.
- extend discussion regarding trackless
- add section about Tools / Modes / Views
- section: Adding clips to the timeline
- section: Selecting clips
- section: Arranging clips
- section: Trimming clips
- section: Splitting and merging clips
- section: Removing clips
- add subchapter regarding sections of the timeline
- Adding and editing transitions
- Changing timeline clip properties
===========================================================
Remark from Ichthyo(committer):
Converted from PDF to raw text with
pdftotext wouter250629v2.pdf WorkflowProposals.txt
Images extracted with
pdfimages -png -j wouter250629v2.pdf wouter/wouter250629v2
Images required no cropping;
the white background images were omitted.
Again adding the images separately to the Website-repository,
in order to save storage space in the main repository....
This is the version from 4.Apr
- add a subchapter about the current NLE landscape
- add a subchapter on tracks vs. trackless
- add a bit more information in the navigation subchapter.
===========================================================
Remark from Ichthyo(committer):
Converted from PDF to raw text with
pdftotext wouter250404v1.pdf WorkflowProposals.txt
Images extracted with
pdfimages -png wouter250404v1.pdf
...and then cropped in Gimp ("crop to content");
images 06 and 11 needed to be split in two parts
cropped in Gimp ("crop to content")
NOTE: Adding the images separately to the Website-repository,
in order to save storage space in the main repository,
because content, once added, can not be removed from Git....
- included the list of "Personas", quoting from Wouter's document
- add some details from the ensuing discussion
- close the document with a section "Conclusions" to list the
most relevant open points
Topic: proposals for Lumiera Workflow
Present:
- Wouter Verweijlen
- Benny Lyons
- Hermann Voßeler
Note: This commit creates a new subsection
for the discussion related to Wouter's »Lumiera Workflow Proposals«....
Starting with ''preview release'' `v0.pre.04`, branch and version tags
will be handled in accordance to the **Git-flow** naming scheme.
Notably this implies that from now on the version in-tree will indicate
the ''next expected release,'' adorned by a suffix to mark the preview.
To accommodate this transition to Git-flow
- the new branch `integration` will be introduced
- the version number will once (and the last time for this release)
be adjusted ''before'' forking the release branch
- branch `master` will transition to reflect the latest released state
- several existing branches will be discontinued, notably
`gui`, `steam`, `vault`, `release`, `play`
Starting with the upcoming ''preview release'', branches, branch names and tags
will be rearranged to follow the Git-flow pattern instead of the existing
ad-hoc organisation with a release branch.
The documentation provided here defines the actual naming conventions
and some fine points regarding the version number upgrades
and placement of release tags.
Furthermore, two helper-scripts are provided to automate version number updates
- `buildVersion.py` : extract current version from git tag and allow to bump version
- `setVersion` : manipulate all relevant files with `sed` to update the version info
This changeset removes various heuristics and marker-traits
by a constraint to tuple_like types. Furthermore, several usages
of `apply` can thereby be generalised to work on any tuple_like.
This generalisation is essential for the passing generic data blocks
via `FeedManifold` into the node invocation
This resolves an intricate problem related to metaprogramming with
variadic templates and function signatures. Due to exceptional complexity,
a direct solution was blocked for several years, and required a better
organisation of the support code involved; several workarounds were
developed, gradually leading to a transition path, which could now
be completed in an focused clean-up effort over the last week.
Metaprogramming with sequences of types is organised into three layers:
- simple tasks can be solved with the standard facilities of the language,
using pattern match with variadic template specialisations
- the ''type-sequence'' construct `Types<T...>` takes the centre stage
for the explicit definition of collections of types; it can be re-bound
to other variadic templates and supports simple direct manipulation
- for more elaborate and advanced processing tasks, a ''Loki-style type list''
can be obtained from a type-sequence, allowing to perform recursive
list processing task with a technique similar to LISP.
Indeed — this change set is kind of sad.
Because I still admire the design of the GAVL library,
and would love to use it for processing of raw video.
However, up to now, we never got to the point of actually
doing so. For the future, I am not sure if there remains
room to rely on lib-GAVL, since FFmpeg roughly covers
a similar ground (and a lot beyond that). And providing
a plug-in for FFmpeg is unavoidable, practically speaking.
So I still retain the nominal dependency on lib-GAVL
in the Build system (since it is still packaged in Debian).
But it is pointless to rely on this library just for an
external type-def `gavl_time_t`. We owe much to this
inspiration, but it can be expected that we'll wrap
these raw time-values into a dedicated marker type
soon, and we certainly won't be exposing any C-style
interface for time calculations in future, since
we do not want anyone to side-step the Lumiera
time handling framework in favour of working
„just with plain numbers“
NOTE: lib-GAVL hompage has moved to Github:
https://github.com/bplaum/gavl
Since C++17 we can use the std::filesystem instead (and we ''do use it'' indeed)
- relocate the `/lib/file.hpp` header
- adapt the self-discovery of the executable to using std::filesystem
Furthermore, some recherche regarding XVideo and Video Output
- remove obsolete configuration settings
- walk through all settings according to the documentation
https://www.doxygen.nl/manual/config.html
- now try to use the new feature to rely on Clang for C++ parsing
- walk through the doxygen-warnings.txt and fix some obvious misspellings
and structural problems in the documentation comments.
With Debian-Trixie, we are now using Doxygen 1.9.8 —
which produces massively better results in various fine points.
However, there are still problems with automatic cross links,
especially from implementation to the corresponding test classes.
Some pre C++11 features are marked deprecated and will be rejected with C++20
Notably the old marker inferfaces for unary (and binary) functions are no longer needed, since function-like objects can be detected by traits or concepts nowadays
Moreover we can get rid of some boost(bind) usages and use a λ
BuilderDoxygen and BuilderGCH are external plug-ins,
not developed in this project and probably unmaintained.
TODO: decide how to fix or replace them...
With the ability to invoke a Render Node graph,
the development on branch `play` reached some kind of milestone
regarding the »Playback Vertical Slice«.
This is a good opportunity to update the reference platform
and upgrade the preview releases and packaging setup accordingly.
This will include adjustments to compile on recent compilers and
upgrade the build system to support Python-3.
Unfortunately, there are some common syntactic structures, which can not easily be dissected by regular expressions alone, since they entail nested subexpressions. While it is possible to get beyond those fundamental limitations with some trickery, doing so remains precisely that, ''trickery.''
After fighting some inner conflicts, since ''I do know how to write a parser'' —
in the end I have brought myself to just do it.
And indeed, as you'd might expect, I have looked into existing library solutions,
and I would not like to have any one of them as part of the project.
* I do not want a ''parser engine'' or ''parser generator''
* I want the directness of recursive-descent, but combined with Regular Expressions as terminal
* I want to see the structure of the used grammar at the definition site of the custom parser function
* I want deep integration of ''model bindings'' into the parse process, i.e. binding-λ
* I do not want to write model-dissecting or pattern-matching code after the parse
* I do not want to expose ''Monads'' as an interface, since they tend to spread unhealthy structure to surrounding code
* I do not want to leak technicalities of the parse mechanics into the using code
* I do not want to impose hard to remember specific conventions onto the user
Thus I've set the following aims:
* The usage should require only a single header include (ideally header-only)
* The entrance point should be a small number of DSL-starter functions
* The parser shall be implemented by recursive-descent, using the parser-combinator technique
* But I want that wrapped into a DSL, to be able to control what is (not) provided or exposed.
* I want a stateful, applicative logic, since parsing, by its very nature, is stateful!
* I want complete compile-time typing, visible to the optimiser, without a virtual »Parser« interface
And last but not least, ''I do not want to create a ticket, since I do not know if those goals can be achieved...''
Remove left-overs from the preceding prototypical implementation,
which is now obliterated by the change to a flexibly configured `FeedManifold`
with structured, typed storage for buffers and for parameter data.
The Render Node invocation sequence, as rearranged and reworked for the »Playback Vertical Slice«, now seems reasonably clear and settled.
Adding extensive documentation to describe the conventions and structures worked out thus far;
moreover, start makeover of old documentation in the !TiddlyWiki to remove concepts obviously obsoleted now...
The overall goal is eventually to arrive at something akin to a ''»Dummy Media-processing Library«''
* this will offer some „Functionality“
* it will work on different ''kinds'' or ''flavours'' of data
* it should provide operations that can be packaged into ''Nodes''
However — at the moment I have no clue how to get there...
And thus I'll start out with some rather obvious basic data manipulation functions,
and then try to give them meaningful names and descriptors. This in turn
will allow to build some multi-step processing netwaorks — which actually
is the near-term goal for the ''main effort'' (which is after all, to get
the Render Node code into some sufficient state of completion)...
There is an insidious problem when the Transformer takes references to internal state
within upstream iterators or state core. This problem only manifests when
a invariant based filtering or grouping operation is added after the Transformer,
because such an operation (notably Filter) will typically attempt to establish
the invariant from the constructor (to avoid dangling state). Unfortunately
doing so involves pulling data ''before the overall pipeline is moved into final location''
A workaround is to make the Transformer ''disengage'' on copy, so to provoke
a refresh and new pull in the new location after the copy / move / swap.
This only works if the transformer function as such is idempotent.
Indeed the solution worked out yesterday could be extracted and turned generic.
Some in-depth testing is necessary though, and possibly some qualifications to allow pass-through of references...
Moreover, last days I started collecting notes regarding problem solving patterns,
which I tend to use frequently, but which might not be obvious and thus can easily
be forgotten. In fact, I had encountered several cases, where I did invent some
roughly similar solution repeatedly, having forgotten about already settled matters.
Hopefully the habit of collecting notes and hints at a central location serves to remedy
