CLAM roadmap

It was quite a long time from my last blog (and planet) entry, and I feel its a good time to explain how things are going on the CLAM development trenches and what core developers have been discussing about the mid-term roadmap (to 1.0 and post 1.0). We wrote a first version of the roadmap in the wiki.

We are still mostly concentrated on having good mac osx binaries. Intel and ppc dmgs are ready to download and test. So I’d say that we are almost there. But before doing a stable release, some things needs to be fixed, specially for powerpc architecture. So, the more testing and bug reports we can get, the better. If you own a mac, please drop by clam-devel and say how applications are behaving. If you don’t, well, do the same; we are specially interested in having a rock-solid NetworkEditor and we want to do a lot of bug-hunting before 1.0.

And now for the roadmap. The following is a stripped-down version of the one in the wiki, but reflects the main goals.

1.0 CLAM release (very short term)

• Due by the first or second week of February
• Main goals: installers for the three platforms (lin, mac, win); get clam applications and libs included in major linux distributions (ubuntu and debian, at least. Maybe fedora core); provide usage videos and announce the release widely. At least two quick and minor release will happen before 1.0 to get more users feedback.
• Tasks to be done includes: Bug hunting session, edit a already recorded video showing NetworkEditor and Prototyper, Fix some problems with Mac OSX applications, and try to get into some Fedora Core repo (planet-ccrma should be the one) and finish inclusion to debian and ubuntu.

1.x CLAM release series (mid term)

• The 1.x releases roadmap will be refined when we release 1.0
• Due by March
• Three main goals: code clean-up, improve clam extensibility mechanisms, and add (many) useful examples for a wider user base.
• Some task to be done (not complete): have a plugin architecture for clam processings; remove unneeded modules and deprecated code; reorganize directories to better match built libraries, simplify the build system (scons); make the addition of new processings (in a plugin) extremely easy; tutorials on how to extend clam; widgets, audio backends and file-formats should be plugins, not dependencies; develop a broad suite of alsa and vst plugins with user-interface (maybe audio-unit also)

There are lots and lots of ideas and features for CLAM 2.0. A long-term roadmap will be defined during 1.x development. Of course, feedback from the users will be very important.