The New CinePaint Team

If you’ve looked at changes to our CinePaint Team web page this week, you may be wondering, who are all these people?


Image courtesy U.S. Air Force

Types of CinePaint Developers

Under our CinePaint Active Developers section is everyone who’s contributed a patch or code via CVS that I expect to have included in our next release. Because volunteer developers cycle in and out of the project at will, I define who’s active based on actual contributions, not on factors such as whether they’re working on CinePaint today or have written code that I haven’t seen, yet.

Under our New Developers section is everyone who’s volunteered to join CinePaint recently. Recruiting and training new volunteers is part of my role as project leader.

With new volunteers, I can’t tell at first who’s going to be stellar and who will flake. To separate the wheat from the chaff, I have new developers start by building CinePaint from anonymous CVS. Unfortunately, most new developers will give up and vanish without completing that simple task. Volunteers simply fade away when they get busy with something else or discover that software development can be challenging. This isn’t a problem special to CinePaint. It’s normal.

Under our Secret Developers section is...well, that’s a secret. In the film industry, it’s normal to work in secret, to wait until your next movie releases before you reveal any of your tricks. If you’re a studio programmer working on something you want to open source, there’s the question of whether the studio legal department will eventually allow you to give the code away. There’s no point in announcing anything until that’s decided, when I actually get the code. Sony Pictures Imageworks and ILM are studios that have contributed code.

Another type of secret programmer is the graduate student working on his thesis. Stefan Klein, who added CMS and 16-bit binary fixed-point color support to CinePaint in 2004, is an example of a grad student developer who made a significant contribution. Graduate work isn’t that secret, but the student may not want to announce his research too broadly until he finishes his thesis. We don’t have any grad student projects currently.

New Release Manager is the Old Release Manager

One of our team changes is me. Based on community feedback, I decided that getting CinePaint released and back into Debian should be our highest priority. Not counting our Mac native port release, CinePaint hasn’t had a new release since June 2007. As discussed here previously, CinePaint’s release manager was set on a plan that would not make Debian any priority. When we couldn’t agree on a plan, he resigned. I’ve become the release manager again.

Debian CinePaint Support

As part of an effort to get our Debian and Ubuntu distribution in order, I’ve reached out for help in those communities. Lars Wirzenius of Finland, who I met at Ubuntu FOSScamp last week, has volunteered to help with our Debian packaging. He joins Jonas Smedegaard of Denmark, who I met at Open Source Days, and H.S. Teoh, who contributed CinePaint’s Scons patch. All three are official Debian packagers, not trainees.

Ubuntu CinePaint Support

Lars Wirzenius is both a Debian packager and a Ubuntu packager. He’s our new Ubuntu packager. At FOSScamp I saw Ubuntu community manager Jono Bacon, who’d already offered support. Although not at FOSScamp, Ubuntu Studio project lead Luis de Bethencourt has promised to help as much as he can. I talked with Ubuntu project leader Mark Shuttleworth. He sat in on my FOSScamp presentation on Open Source Team Leadership. He suggested that CinePaint use Ubuntu LauchPad and make use of the Bazaar version control system. More on that another time…

Love you guys!

Robin