| You correctly if indirectly raise the important question, when would Csound
5 be "finished" (i.e., out of beta status)?
The answer may be different for me than it is for John ffitch. Other
developers might have their own ideas also.
I would consider it "finished" when it can run Improsculpt and has
acceptable audio latency and FLTK widget behavior on Windows XP, Linux, and
Mac OS X. This is probably only a few months away. I don't think any the
changes required for this would introduce any new backward
incompatibilities.
John ffitch might not consider it "finished" until he has contributed his
parser or until the code is completely re-entrant. I have no idea how long
that would take. Some of these changes might, or might not, introduce new
backward incompatibilities.
It would always be possible to label the state of Csound 5 sources at any
time, and consider that the new "canonical" version while further
development continues. Those building the "canonical" version, which could
be the default build, would be building with sources as of that label.
Original Message:
-----------------
From: Anthony Kozar anthony.kozar@utoledo.edu
Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 12:55:58 -0500
To: csound-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [Cs-dev] Re: ending the code freeze
Well, I thought that I had been pretty clear about what I thought would be a
reasonable course of action that might at least partially please everyone.
But clearly I was not as clear as I thought :)
I agree with so many of the arguments *against* unfreezing the code at all.
And yet I DO think that Csound 5 is a LONG ways off. (My totally unfounded
guess for the earliest possible release date would be Dec. 2005 -- and I
think that is VERY optimistic). So, I also understand and sympathize with
Dr. B's wish to reconcile the opcode lists in Csound 4 before Csound 5
arrives.
A few quick points:
* I do not think that we should perform "major surgery" on Csound 4 under
any circumstances.
* I have never suggested that we try to provide Csound 5 enhancements such
as reentrancy, multiple instances, etc. in Csound 4.
* Adding existing opcodes from CsoundAV, Istvan's 4.24, or MacCsound, that
do not change *anything* outside their own files is trivial. This is
primarily what Dr. B is asking for !
* I have argued and still mostly believe that adding these opcodes as
plugins to Csound 4 would be better. But to satisfy Dr. B's requests, this
requires that the maintainers of non-canonical versions be willing to
support opcode plugins using an identical interface if they do not already.
* What we are currently calling "Csound 5" is somewhat misleading. I think
that it works well because it is not that much different than Csound 4 yet.
The biggest and most radical changes have not yet been made. (1)
My conclusion for now -- based on the current prevailing consensus -- is
that we should NOT unfreeze canonical Csound 4 at all. Efforts to make some
of the missing opcodes available as plugins could be made. And getting
CsoundAV and MacCsound to fully support Csound 4-style plugins NOW would not
only be the best solution, but makes sense since all other versions of
Csound 4 support them (AFAIK).
Furthermore, as soon as I finish up the current Mills update that I am
working on, I pledge to put more effort into helping with Csound 5
development. I have been reluctant to do so previously because many of the
changes made so far have made Csound 5 incompatible with MacOS 9 without a
lot more work. (2) But Istvan's recent addition of rtaudio plugins may make
Csound 5 reasonably possible on MacOS 9 again. (3)
In any case, I will try to make Csound 5 more of a priority than Csound 4
for myself from now on. And I am glad that we had this discussion so that
everyone will have a deeper understanding of the current situation.
Anthony Kozar
anthony.kozar@utoledo.edu
http://akozar.spymac.net/
(1) Of course, this is just my opinion, and I admit much ignorance about
Csound 5.
(2) The term "cross-platform" usually doesn't include MacOS 9 :) I simply
do not have the time to port or check old ports of PortAudio, PortMidi,
Scons, fluid, FLTK, Loris, Python, etc., and maintain them or worry about
whether future changes to Csound will require updating to a new version of
one of these libraries which is now incompatible with OS 9, etc.
(3) Or perhaps Csound 5 will will only be a second-class citizen on OS 9
without real-time support and all the extra bells and whistles.
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