Hi!

I have received multiple requests right now, of the form: I want to use
aRts for <foo>, where foo is currently unsupported.

Popular foos include threading, gui building, video support, midi support,
applying effects inside wave editors and similar. Of course, what everybody
wants is a nice example which explains easily how to do foo with aRts, so
you can start coding your application ;-).

Unfortunately, I can't provide this at this point of time. The original plan
for KDE2.0 was not to include any of the above foos, and this had the reason
that the timing was tight even without them. But I see that it would be cool
to have them anyway.

So I see only one way how we can do this:

 * please communicate with eachother - it doesn't help if we end up having
   three incompatible ways to do video with aRts after all

   currently, the place for aRts development is kde-multimedia@kde.org
   there is arts@space.twc.de, too, but it is currently user oriented
   and maintaining the old aRts-0.3.4 code

   of course sometimes its better to send me a mail, but often, the list
   is more appropriate, since other people will read it, and eventually,
   an aRts developer community will be there

 * realease your code as early as possible, not only to me, but to the world
   kdenonbeta is a good place to do so

 * try to get an understanding of what MCOP is all about - it is not finished,
   but aRts will live due to that technology

 * read the source, and the (unfortunately very thin) documentation

 * ask where you don't understand things

 * rather do a small enhancement first, than waiting for the completion of
   everything

 * experiment

aRts is growing, which is cool. If it is to grow as fast as many of you
really want it to, its something I can no longer do alone. I'll try to
do the essential components, the next very important thing is aRtsbuilder
and some Brahms stuff.

I'll also try to coordinate documentation and PR stuff as good as I can. But
special things - like video - are things where *you* could be the responsible
person. ;-)

In the spirit of the shared effort, I committed the new-tech.html page in
kdelibs/arts/doc. Feel free to add new sections to it, write in what
you are working on, add links, etc. - there is some video code I wrote there,
so there is something to start with.

I am looking forward to your contributions.

   Cu... Stefan
-- 
  -* Stefan Westerfeld, stefan@space.twc.de (PGP!), Hamburg/Germany
     KDE Developer, project infos at http://space.twc.de/~stefan/kde *-