Coding Day Activities

Coding Day

On Tuesday July 29th, we'll be having a day of code to get release 1.6.0 ready to go. If you want to help, hop on our IRC channel (#mixxx on Freenode) and we'll get you involved.

There's tons of stuff to do, here's a list:

• Coding/Bug fixing obviously needs doing, visit the launchpad tracker and talk to the developers
• Testing will be needed at various points on various platforms throughout the day
• Documentation needs plenty of work
• Especially the manual could use a lot of work
• New website design is in progress, anyone with useful php/javascript/jquery skills should talk to asantoni (IRC)
• Could use some new high quality skins if there are any designers out there

Available Non-Coding Tasks:

• Help us finish the new manual. The PDF manual currently bundled with Mixxx is ancient, and the original source document for it is lost to the sands of time. For 1.6.0, we've decided to rewrite the manual. We need your help writing sections for it though - some of you know Mixxx very well and doubtlessly have better writing skills than us. Take a crack at filling in one of the empty sections of the Mixxx 1.6.0 manual. In particular:
• Many of the interface elements in the UI Overview are incomplete - a few sentences will suffice for each.
• Figure out what we're missing. Take a peek at what we have, and try to think of any big points that we've missed in the manual. Comb over the old manual as well for ideas.
• Test Serato CD support. Got a CDJ? Have a CD discman or anything that plays CDs? Download the Serato CD wave, burn it to a CD, and test to see if you can control Mixxx via your CDJ or discman.
• The wave can be downloaded here:http://rane.com/scratchlivecontrol.zip
• Report your findings on IRC and here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/mixxx/+bug/186341
• Create the massive 1.6.0 changelog. Go through the Mixxx Blog archives, and find the release announcements for 1.6.0 beta 1, 2, 3, and 4. A changelog was included with each release - copy and paste the changelog bullets from each announcement into one gigantic document. Email that to someone on IRC.
• Help us reproduce crazy Windows bugs. We don't have very many Windows developers (or developers with Windows installed even), so it's hard for us to track down certain Windows-only bugs. In particular, the following three bugs have been driving us crazy:
• Program fails to open - We think we've fixed this in Beta4, but we can't get in touch with the person who reported the bug initially, so we don't know for sure. If anyone can reproduce this on Windows, or confirmed that the problem was fixed for them when upgrading from Beta3 to Beta4, please let us know.
• Mixxx doesn't exit cleanly - Same deal, we may have fixed this already, but we don't know. Do you have this problem on Windows? Get in touch with us and we'll try to track it down with you.
• Runtime error on exit - A user reported this problem with Vista Home Premium + SP1. Are you using Vista? Does Mixxx work for you? Yes or no, please let us know. If you're encountering this problem too, please get in touch on IRC or by email and we'll track it down with you.

Available Coding Tasks:

• Crush bugs with an iron fist. Baby, we've got bugs. Take a crack at any bug marked "new" or "confirmed". While most of those bugs are not 1.6.0 release blockers, we'll still accept patches for most of them. Bugs that are probably fixable without a huge time investment:
• Library rescan doesn't work sometimes
• Scanning library does not exit cleanly (might be related to above)
• New playlist doesnt show up initially
• Cleanup Input Controllers Prefs. The "Input Controllers" preferences pane contains unsupported (broken) mouse control stuff. Remove this from dlgprefmidi.cpp and dlgprefmididlg.ui and send us a patch.
• QSpinBox->QDoubleSpinBox in Interface Prefs. The temporary and permanent pitch/rate buttons options in the interface preferences pane uses QSpinBox controls, which only support integer numbers. The value in the spinbox controls is actually divided by 1000 before being applied to Mixxx's engine (a value of 400 turns into a pitch bend of 0.4%). Your task is to change the QSpinBox controls to QDoubleSpinBox and remove the division by 1000, so it's WYSIWYG. Make your changes to dlgprefcontrols.cpp and dlgprefcontrolsdlg.ui and send us a patch. Please test the hell out of this before sending us a patch because we'd rather not break this before 1.6.0.

Tasks In-Progess:

• Fixing the cue button for the Hercules on Windows
• assigned to adam_d, might be finished already.
• PHP: Generate news...better - The news on our front page is generated by this magpierss php script, which downloads and parses our RSS feed from our Launchpad announcements. What we'd like to have is it to use our blog's RSS feed, but to ignore entries that aren't tagged with "news". This way, when we want to post news that'll show up on the front page, we'll just post on the blog and make sure we include the "news" tag. Existing code: http://senduit.com/654416
• assigned to mattorsky

What We Got Done

Let's keep track of how productive we were:

• make ov_fopen ifdef'd for Windows
• remove crufty unsupported mouse controls from the preferences
• added clear button to the search box
• many SConscript changes / fixes
• added support for a new MIDI controller : NuMark TotalControl
• found and filed a lot of Windows bugs (hooray!)
• fixed an XML parsing bug
• new artwork for 1.6.0 website