Re: OSX Help

On 03/02/2014 10:43 AM, Chris Share wrote:

Hi Chris,

Since Paul didn't reply yet, let me welcome you to the team.

> Hi,
> 
> I'm a musician (guitar), programmer (C/C++) and tech writer. I
> primarily work on OS X. I've noticed that the last few releases of
> Ardour have been accompanied by the following comment: "Once again,
> the OS X release situation has still not improved".
> 
> What are the current problems with OS X releases ? 

In short: developer time and love :)

Technically, I think the two main issues are AU plugin support (edge
cases with many plugins) and window-mangement (layering), but there are
a lot of small details which, combined, yield a rather bad
user-experience on OSX. There are currently ~200 OSX-related issues
listed at http://tracker.ardour.org/

Aside from technical details, there's some community ones: Most current
developers and testers prefer to work on GNU/Linux. There are also
sufficient bugs left to squash in A3 esp. regarding midi-tracks. Focus
is on those first. This is likely to change in the not too distant
future (Ardour 3.8) after which shifting focus to other platforms will
become a priority.

> I'm willing to
> help out in this area, provided that the tasks required are not too
> time-consuming. I have some free time available each week and I'd
> like to dedicate to an open-source audio project like Ardour.

Any help is very welcome.
I suppose the hardest part will be to get a build-environment up and to
understand the design of the rather large code-base.
There are some script to assist with the former. For the latter it may
be helpful to subscribe to
http://lists.ardour.org/listinfo.cgi/ardour-cvs-ardour.org (despite the
name it's git-diffs).

> How can I help out?

There's no single answer to that. The best is probably "find something
that you want fixed and fix it" :)

Most development discussions and communication takes place on IRC
#ardour on freenode.net. The easiest way to get there is via
http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=ardour but there are IRC clients
for OSX,.. It's most active daytime EST.

ciao,
robin