The only remaining issue is one we cannot fix on this end. If you are a user that managed to download and install a skin over the past few days, and that skin is missing textures or otherwise doesn’t look exactly right, you may need to delete and reinstall it. To do so, you will need to navigate to the packages folder inside your userdata folder, delete the skin zip file, and then open XBMC, uninstall the skin, and then reinstall it. This issue will likely affect a very, very limited minority of users, but for those it does affect, don’t hesitate to ask questions in the forums if you have issues.

For everyone else, downloads are up and running. Feel free to browser some of our addons and download to your heart’s content, or get to downloading XBMC itself.

More good news is that we can easily correct the results of the bug by hand. The bad is that the bug continues to create problems on a semi-regular basis. Unfortunately, until we get this resolved, downloads will continue to suffer on an intermittent basis.

The moment we get this fully resolved, we’ll be certain to create a new blog post to let you know. In the meantime, please bear with us as we sort through this issue.

Finally, for current users of XBMC who are not trying to install new addons, your current addons and other features should continue to work without issue. Users of a fresh install of XBMC may have some issues with addons that have unmet dependencies. Unfortunately there is little we can do about this until the situation is resolved.

Thank you in advance for your patience.

Additionally, if any users have happen to have a thorough knowledge of the innerworkings of MirrorBrain, feel free to speak up in the comments.

You can install an Add-on from inside XBMC by simply browsing the official repository and clicking through the XBMC GUI. What we have been missing for a long time is a way to discover these amazing extensions to XBMC through the web. So without further ado.. we introduce you to:

http://addons.xbmc.org

Some features:

- Source Code Links
- Forum Links
- Download stats
- License Details
- Icons
- Search box (top right)
- Random Add-Ons
- Recent, new and popular lists
- Developer charts

We have grand plans for the website in the future including screenshots, a developers upload area, user ratings/reviews, development tutorials and direct donation links so people can finally be rewarded for their work. If you have any suggestions please feel free to comment below or in the dedicated thread on our forums. As with all parts of XBMC, the Add-On website is opensource and available on GitHub account to download and contribute to. We would also like to remind current Add-on developers to update their addons.xml with the relevant information to show on the website.

NOTE: This website only shows Add-ons uploaded to our official repository that have passed our submission process

Skins

Skins will undergo the most changes because of the difference in Gotham compared to Frodo. This due to changes in code handling, appearance, varying improvements and features.

Due to these changes we have set the GUI API version to 5.0.0 which is a mayor version bump compared to Frodo. This means that Frodo skins will need to be adapted to match the Gotham changes for them to fully work again. For now the GUI version will still be backwards compatible however this might change as we will near the Betas or Release-Candidates versions.

Due to the rather long list of changes I will not mention them specific.

- various new infolabels and infobools
- extend aspect-ratio and resolution flags
- 3D (stereoscopic) support
- change for the videodb:// and musicdb:// paths
- different settings levels
- context menu changes
- label positioning changes
- subtitle add-ons have been split up
- and more…

Hopefully these changes will not be to much work for skin developers to adapt to and we will see the number of true Gotham compatible skins rising before the final release of Gotham.

You can read up the complete list of changes in a dedicated forum thread that can be found here: Changes to the skinning engine for XBMC Gotham

Python Add-ons

For python Add-ons also known better as scripts and plugins there will actually be very little change which I’m sure you will all welcome very much. So the good news is that if your Add-on work in Frodo it will most likely also work in Gotham. The only big changes are actually adding new features to the python API that can be used in several ways.

List of newly added features:
- extend Monitor() class with: onDatabaseScanStarted, onNotification
- add missing sort methods
- removing item from ControlList
- autoclose option for yes/no dialog
- background progress dialog as used by the library scan progress dialog
- notification dialog
- xbmcvfs.exists to support check if  directory exists
- convertLanguage for converting between ISO 639-1, ISO 639-2 and normal language name  i.e. Englisch
- add keyboard to dialog class
- removal of $LOCALIZE[SCRIPTXXX] in global skinning engine.

Due to these changes we have set the minimum python API version to 2.1.0 which has to be set in addon.xml. Since this version was already available in Frodo it won’t affect your Add-on in any way. Any Add-on that still has a lower API version set will still work in Frodo but will be marked broken in Gotham.

You can read up the complete list of changes in a dedicated forum thread that can be found here: Changes to the python API for XBMC Gotham.  There’s also a thread with some minor tips that might prove useful here.

The fully updated python API documentation can be found at: XBMC PyDocs

JSON-RPC

JSON-RPC which is used for requesting/sending data and controlling XBMC has also undergone little changes compared to Frodo. They mainly consist of several bug fixes and addition of new features.

List of most important newly added features:

- limits to Files.GetDirectory
- recursive parameter to Playlist.Item directories
- change for the videodb:// and audiodb:// paths as also mentioned for skins
- media parameter to Playlist.Item directory type
- favourites namespace
- profiles namespace
- and more…

The minimum API version for JSON-RPC is still set at 6.0.0 which only has effect for Add-ons. Any outside application needs to query the JSON-RPC introspect to see what version is available.

You can read up the complete list of changes in a dedicated forum thread that can be found here: Changes to the JSON-RPC API for XBMC Gotham

Media information Scrapers

Well this will be the shortest section. Nothing has changed so far and any Frodo scraper should be fully compatible with Gotham.

Add-on repository

The main benefit of Gotham will be that it will use the same repository as Frodo. The main advantage is that it will save developers time and effort making separate versions for each XBMC version. If the Add-on works in Frodo it should also work in Gotham. However we would still like to ask to test this thoroughly if this is the case. Another advantage is on our side as it requires less time checking and pushing the Add-ons to the public. If your Add-on user API functions that are only available in Gotham you will need to request it to be added to Gotham only which will only make it available for Gotham users.

For skins however we will still require separate versions as there are to many changes in the skin engine between Frodo and Gotham. We understand this is a burden on developers scarce time  but alas this is part of the continuing development we are doing. Especially for skin developers we have a special “Skin development repo” in which they can provide so called beta versions of their skins to users who are wiling to help test it out before releasing it to the larger audience. This repo has more relaxed rules compared to the official repository to help in providing a stepping stone to the final version. Read more in this dedicated forum thread.

For more information about Add-on development you can visit our wiki page about  “development” or visit our forum if you have specific questions.

If you feel ready to include you Add-on to our repository and make it public to our vast amount of users please read the following wiki page explaining the process: Official Add-on repository. This page contains several rules and guidelines which need to be followed before we will allow it to be added. They may sound strict however they are there for several reasons to protect XBMC or the users. Of course our Add-on repository isn’t limited to English Add-ons only. We allow them for every region across the world as long as they follow our guidelines.

Developer courtesy

At times some add-ons, either being it plug-ins or programs or the most beautiful skins become abandoned due the the developer loosing interest, high maintenance or more common and most important that his real life has a higher priority. As most if not all the add-ons are developed as open-source, any one is free to pick up the work where he left and take over support and development to continue the work. However before doing so please take the courtesy to take a few steps as courtesy.
- Try to contact the original developer through either the forum, his development  repo or e-mailing him if possible.
- Most if not all devs appreciated fellow devs sending fixes to them to ease the development.
- Allow some time before actually taking over (few months). So the dev isn’t in for a surprise if he came back from holiday i.e.

If you are not sure feel free to ask around on steps to take. There are some great add-ons out there and it would be a shame if they were lost due to lack of time. So try to help out fellow developers out and I know for sure they will appreciate the effort taken.

Conclusion

If you are an Add-on developer and would like to start working on either Frodo or Gotham Add-ons please visit our download page to acquire the appropriate build of your needs and start coding.

which is of course not limited to English onl

With the update scheduled to be a part of Gotham, subtitle search services have been broken into individual addons, so something like OpenSubtitles (a frequently used service) would be a separate addon from any other subtitle search service out there. More importantly, OpenSubtitles would be releasable by the actual developer of the service without having to go through Team XBMC.

This change should give addon developers in this area a great deal more latitude for implementing changes and fixes without needing to wait for other addon devs to submit similar fixes, all to the benefit of the user experience.

From the user perspective, the only significant change will be in the way a subtitle search service is downloaded. Right now, it is already available and merely needs enabling, as there is only a single addon. In the future, the user will need to select and download their preferred addon before starting a movie and searching for subtitles.

In the end, this is a fairly minor change that will make XBMC just a bit better from our perspective as users, but a major improvement from the perspective of the developers working for us all on a daily basis. For everyone, that makes it a win-win.

Update: It should be noted that if you depend on subtitle downloading on a daily basis, you should avoid nightlies and probably the upcoming alpha, as it will take some time for addon devs to update to the new system.

As already very briefly mentioned earlier this year we had to split up several things as they where all hosted on a single server. This was due to the increasing load of visitors on our website, forum, wiki pages and in parallel our increasing xbmc test building and downloads. This new server  (called “srv1″) now hosts only our forum, trac and the wiki pages. Our other server (called “Babylon”) hosts our forum and our new add-on web page about which we will tell you more soon.

We also want to present to you “Jenkins”.  So who is  Jenkins? Jenkins is an application that monitors executions of repeated jobs, such as building a software project or jobs running timely builds. In the beginning of 2013 we started replacing our old “Billy the Buildbot” who had served us for many years and is still used for building our  Frodo releases (and can soon retire after a well deserved service). We chose to replace it with Jenkins as it more fit our needs due to it’s versatility. Since the start of this year it has been churning out our Gotham nightly builds for our Windows, OSX, iOS and Android platform and placing it automatically on our server for download.

This for the purpose to notice if any of the code merged broke building on one of our platform and for actually testing out the added code. Later in the year we added a new feature (which has proven to pay off) that we could first build every pull request (request to merge new code). This to see if the new code would actually build on all platforms before adding this new code to XBMC (as you can see in the image on the left). In the past this has happened this happened quite often and we would only notice the next day and devs had to fix it again.

So how does it work? Well to put it simple, we have one master which controls several build slaves. These slaves are the actually workers that create the XBMC installs that you download, install and use. Well to put it in simple terms we tell the master to build a certain XBMC revision and it then send the appropriate information to the slaves who then go to work. When finished they put it up for download on our mirror system. In reality of course it’s not that simple but we don’t want to bore you with that. It does however require several servers and machines to pull this off. For this we have an array of different sponsors who offered their services through providing the needed equipment.  Bytemark who has been providing the server for our old buildbot and is in addition is also our main download server (called “Atlantis”) has been kind enough to provide us with a new beast of a server (called “Camelot”) to crunch out our Windows and Android builds. Then we have several slaves for OSX/iOS builds sponsored by Mythic Beasts and MacMiniVault.

Mirrors and Mirrorbrain

The more interesting part for users is the mirror system that hosts these builds. We have several large and smaller mirrors across the globe who all have a copy of our XBMC builds. This is to make sure not everyone across the world only downloads from our single server but actually downloads it from the servers nearest by. For actually distributing the downloads and making sure you will download from the best server available we have been using Mirrorbrain, which has been operating since 2010 and so far hasn’t failed us yet. This is a great piece of software that constantly checks the status of the mirrors and dishes out files based on certain criteria, in an effort to ensure that downloads work as quickly and reliably as possible. Besides these builds it also hosts all the add-on which you can find in our official XBMC.org repository.

A list of all our current mirrors is located here. As you can see in the list (and image below) we have a reasonable coverage across the globe but of course we always welcome more mirrors that are hosted by institutions, universities or companies who have a high speed connection.

Gratitude

So we as a team would like to express our sincere gratitude to all these the companies and other open source projects for providing us the means to make our lives easier . Either in providing us the needed hardware and internet connections or by giving us the tools to do so. Not to forget the list of mirrors that are currently distributing our builds and add-ons across the globe.

Technical details

So here are our hardware specs for those who are interested. Fun fact is that we have named the servers after the old release names of XBMC. Due to the age and the increase usage load of the server on which Jenkins, Mirrorbrain and several other services run, we will hopefully be replacing it shortly with a shiny new one.

September cycle

ActiveAE – A Simpler Approach to Audio

With the September month’s alpha, we are also excited to introduce ActiveAE, an engine for audio that’s based off AudioEngine but designed to be faster, simpler, and lighter on the CPU. ActiveAE relies on FFmpeg for audio conversion and is available now on Windows, Linux, BSD, and Android. Very early work exists to get it working on OSX too, though no set date exists for its incorporation.

Features of ActiveAE include its being an event-based system; CPU load is significantly reduced, allowing for implementation on weaker systems like Android; Resampler quality can be chosen; gapless playback is now working; and E-AC3 is supported. In addition, quite a lot of little, difficult to narrow down bugs have been tracked down and fixed, including code that reaches all the way into SSE. This hopefully solves the issues we had in our Frodo release that a minority of the users experienced and improves the audio experience in general.

The list of individuals responsible for all this work is quite extensive with pieces touched by nearly the entire team, including wiso’s work on Windows and Voyager’s work debugging SSE and giving feedback, not to mention input from almost everyone on the Audio Settings rewrite. Special mention should go to both FernetMenta and fritsch, who led the charge. Finally, an extra special thanks to the many users who provided testing and feedback in the ActiveAE testing thread. This work couldn’t have been done without you.

As a heads up for next month, we have also refurbished the audio settings to make them easier to configure. You’ll be able to see that work now in nightlies or in next month’s alpha.

Of course there were more changes, but those changes mostly contained code re-factoring/improvement and bugfixing.

A complete change log for the interested can be found here

October Cycle

Actually for October there isn’t much to report for new features added. This months list contains a whole list of code re-factoring/improvement and bugfixing which we don’t want to bore you with.

Android MediaCodec:
This allows native use of the Android API for video playback on Android 4.1 (and up) devices

Android x86 architecture support:
We already provided Android build that run on ARM architecture devices however from this month on we will also provide x86 architecture builds.

Ability to development on non-jailbroken devices:
This allows developers who have an Apple developer account (so not for regular users!) to be able to run and development XBMC on non-jailbroken devices. This is however without and video HW acceleration support. So again, this is NOT for normal users, only for developers.

Complete change log for the interested can be found here.

Dealing with OSX 10.9

As many of you may have experienced, 10.9 has caused a number of issues for our current releases. In addition to forcing us to prepare a 12.3 (coming soon), we’ve learned that 10.9 appears to have reset security settings. Now to install XBMC, you need to right click the application after it’s been installed and select “Open” from the list (this need only be done once).

Alternatively, you can go to System Preferences -> Security & Privacy -> General. From there, unlock the lock at the bottom of the window and “Allow apps downloaded from: Anywhere.” This second method is the preferred method, as you will no longer be bothered for future XBMC updates.

Conclusion

So if you feel you are ready to try out a monthly build, it’s time to start downloading. Be aware though, that this is still alpha software which contains potentially several bugs. There is a  good chance that this alpha will break on you.

• Windows
• OSX and OSX-x86-64
• Android-ARM and Android-x86
• Apple TV and iOS installation instructions
• Ubuntu users, please point to the unstable ppa as described in the Linux instructions
• OpenELEC users, please see OpenELEC forum

Note: blog post image made by Schym Christian

How to Contribute

If you use these builds, we encourage you to submit bugs in Trac, provide support in our Forums where you can, or donate to the Foundation if you like. For a current FAQ on XBMC 13, visit our Gotham FAQ.

Release Manager

We will continue the course set with the Frodo release and assigned a release manager who will take it upon him to handle the process from the moment of feature freeze till the time of the final release. The Release Manager will determine when a new Beta is released, when XBMC is ready to switch to release candidates and in the end the final release. This also accounts for whether code changes are fixes (OK) or features (not OK). This of course in conjunction with the team of developers who have specific knowledge of the code areas. Needless to say, it is a thankless job and a job that requires a person who is both extremely well versed in the code of XBMC and not afraid to make people angry to get the job done.

One change from last year which there was only one release manager (which we would like to thank him for doing an excellent job) is that we have now appointed two to handle the release. This should lighten the burden as now they can take dissensions together on what the best course of actions should be taken.

This year JMarshall and AlTheKiller volunteered to be our Release Managers for XBMC 13. We are convinced that they will do a truly fantastic job in the role together with the support of our entire team.

What does this actually mean for the users

For the average user, this means a couple things. First, you could be expecting to see XBMC Beta releases coming out some time after the last merge window set at December 10th. Second, given our fairly well documented open development cycle, there should be very few surprises from then until the release of Gotham. By definition, the features you see now are the same features you will see when Gotham is released with the possible exception of some smaller updates in the default skin Confluence. One downside you may notice is that due to changes done during development we have bumped the minimum requirements for Add-ons and skin. So if you are still using old plugins or scripts they might end up broken. The same will likely happen for skins depending if the authors have provided a skin that is compatible with Gotham. More information will follow for developers shortly.

So if you’d like to see what XBMC 13 is going to look like, feel free to install the last available alpha monthly build which you can find in the links to at the bottom of this post. We’ve noticed that already a lot of people are installing these monthly version and are happily using these and providing feedback. We hope that this change we set in last year has proven to be effective for having a more stable and better XBMC. As always, it’s important to remember that the alphas are definitely alpha software that you use at your own risk.

How can you help

There are many ways you can help actually. The easiest way to help is actually installing the Gotham builds and take them for a test-drive to see if you encounter any issues which can be reproducible by our developers. By providing detailed information like debuglogs and steps to reproduce, bugs can be narrowed down more quickly to find a solution for them. If you are a developer yourself it would even be great if you could fix the issue and send it to our code base on Github. Another option is helping out on the translation of XBMC and it’s many Add-ons and skins as explained here: Translating XBMC. There are of course more ways like helping other users out on the forum or simply help spreading the use of XBMC.

Bonus: If you really like the Gotham image used in this post you can get a 1080p version here to replace your background with.

Conclusion

So if you feel you are ready to try out a last monthly build (October), it’s time to start downloading. Be aware though, that this is still alpha software which contains potentially several bugs. There is a  good chance that this alpha will break on you.

• Windows
• OSX and OSX-x86-64
• Android-ARM and Android-x86
• Apple TV and iOS installation instructions
• Ubuntu users, please point to the unstable ppa as described in the Linux instructions
• OpenELEC users, please see OpenELEC forum

How to Contribute

If you use these builds, we encourage you to report possible bugs with enough information, if possible provide support in our Forums where you can, or donate to the Foundation if you like. For a current FAQ on XBMC 13, visit our Gotham FAQ.

Take a look at the chart below to find out (based on audio universal scraper usage*). Currently Microsoft Windows makes up over half of the XBMC user base but this is shrinking with the rise of easy Linux installs such as OpenELEC. We’ve also seen a large increase in Raspberry Pi users in the last few months. It seems many people like the idea of using a cheap bit of hardware as a home theatre device.

* The data was collected from 24 days of music requests from http://www.theaudiodb.com/ so its not a reflection of the entire XBMC ecosystem, just people requesting music metadata. The last time we checked our add-on statistics, we had around 1.9 million active installs around the world.

This live blog is intended to keep users up to date with DevCon conversations. I’ll likely update roughly once at the change of each hour, so there’s no real reason to constantly hit refresh. If you don’t see an update on the hour, I’ll hold back up updating until the next hour.

Day 2

16.00 (4PM) – Short Presentations Continued

Binary Addons

Already exist in the form of screensavers and PVR addons.

The goal is to allow things like PVR addons to have their own release cycles. And we’d like to extend the concept to audio codecs and other things. To make this happen we need something that can handle numerous tasks. This thing can be Cmake.

Cmake is cross platform, can download, build, and extract, can bootstrap a source tree, can generate all existing buildsystems, can handle installation, and can handle zip (or tgz) packaging. However, it’s pretty new to almost all of us.

For now, everything needs to be expanded to fit all platforms, so dev volunteers are needed.

5.00 (3PM) – Short presentations Continued

Addon Frontend – Zag

An addon frontend is a central location for 3rd party addons or apps (sometimes called a Portal or an Appstore or whatever)

The purpose of the frontend is to provide a place for users to explore and interact with the add-on. And a place for creators to market their addons. It also acts as a place to centralize addon metadata, and a place to to link to addons.

A frontend has been developed, but needs several things:

Easy example addon, more complex example addon. Wiki integration. Source Code availability. Forum mentors.

4.00 (2PM) – Short presentations Continued

Heimdall – Topfs2

Plan is to split Heimdall into core + optional modules, then push core and modules into addon repo, then have a python scraper to call Heimdall.

What to fix before inclusion:

• Have a way to handle API keys
• Differentiate between errors and warnings (e.g. when site gives 404, warning)
• Decide what to do about ontologies
• finalize task api

A brief explanation of how Heimdall works.

Retroplayer – Garbear

Vision: Zero configuration multi-system emulator where you just show XBMC where a game is and launch it. To make this possible, we need Heimdall (uses as many scrapers as necessary) + PyRomInfo (sniffs magic words to resolve gaming platform without guesswork). It’s similar to how videos work in XBMC. It doesn’t matter what codec a video uses. XBMC just plays the video. Retroplayer should do exactly the same thing.

In addition, Public domain ROMs (which include things like Pac-Man clones, etc.) should be automatically accessible free (and legally) to users.

Current Status:

• Games window
• just-in-time emulator installation

Issues

• Joystick API needs a rewrite
• settings.xml is hacky
• emulators are fairly buggy
• Controller counts are wacky

Next

• Display RGB w/o converting YUV422
• Fixes to libretro
• Heimdall
• PyRomInfo
• Scrapers (e.g. TheGamesDB.net)
• Games Library
• Python app for per-controller configuration (so your controller works perfectly with each system)
• Expose info (current level, number of lives, number of coins earned, etc.) to GUI/Savestate manager
• Hook up something like Retrode, which would be pretty cool

12.00 (Noon) – Short presentations

ActiveAE – Fernet Menta

PAPlayer was straining quite a bit in the past. ActiveAE was designed to make everything faster, easier, and more efficient. The Active Object Model used by ActiveAE is similar to message queues in DVDPlayer. It handles messages based on the state of the object.

Jenkins – Martijn

Martijn shows us how building with Jenkins works and how it integrates with Github.

11.00 (11AM) – Sponsor Talks

at-visions

at-visions is a company that provides XBMC inside various luxury hotels around the world, including Europe, Dubai, and, I believe, even possibly Las Vegas.

The presentation started with a review of some of their hotels and skins where they run XBMC. One hotel is a mere 800 EUR a night to stay!

at-visions has also created a pure python game that’s vaguely similar to Space Invaders. They intend ultimately on open sourcing it and making it available to the XBMC community. So cool.

Much of the remainder of at-vision time was discussion between various developers from both XBMC and at-visions about potential improvements to the system.

Pivos

Pivos is working on all kinds of cool things. New hardware, updated software. Exciting times ahead.

10.00 (10AM) – Project Management

Two issues. PRs and Release Manager

PRs: Right now it’s very difficult to know who to ping when you want your PR reviewed. Or in some cases, it’s easy to know the first person to ping, but after that there’s a blank. First solution, create a spreadsheet that actually lists the people who are knowledgeable about all the various components.

Selecting a release manager for XBMC 13 was put off for later.

End of Day 1

16.00 (4PM) – XBMC 14: What’s next?

This year, we’re going to have a race for version 14. Whichever of the following three features is finished first will be the one to signal feature freeze for 14 and will be the main feature for 14.

• Retroplayer/ Game Library
• UPnP Multi-Client
• Bump ffmpeg 2.x.y (bluray mvc support)

14.00 (2PM) – XBMC 13: Gotham Release

What features do we still want to push into XBMC 13 before we freeze?

Gotham: What will be in?

• 3d Support
• Audio settings
• ActiveAE
• Wayland

Feature Freeze November 10th

Nice to have:

• Settings refactor (JSON/python)
• Pulse Audio sink
• SDL (Either 2.0 or drop it)
• ActiveAE CA sink
• bump ffmpeg 2.0

Freeze: If these are going to be in, they need to be in the 10th of December, PR has to be in by the 1st.

No (For 14 or beyond):

• Heimdall
• Retroplayer
• UPnP Multi-client
• Google Play Store (size and licensing issues)
• Binary Addons

13.00 (1PM)

Multi-Client XBMC – Jonathan Marshall

What we want:

• Each client has a local library
• Each shares that library over UPnP
• Each client then adds what it picks up over UPnP to its own library, flagging as remote
• Thus, each client has access to everything

Necessary ingredients:

• local libraries
• UPnP server/client to share those libraries
• flagging of local content

Missing bits: duplicate handling

• More than one path to the same content is probably going to happen
• multi-formats
• Several ways to handle duplicates

12.00 PM

Updated Settings System – Presentation by Montellese

In the past, settings were directly connected with the GUI. Which means the only way to change the setting was to make the change in the GUI. The new settings are defined in settings.xml and are completely decoupled from the GUI. In the future, this will allow settings will be manipulatable by addons and other outside systems, allowing for things like settings optimization addons.

Settings can also be manipulated on a platform or appliance level, so Pivos could add pivos-specific settings without needing to touch any of the original settings. So it will be possible now to add new settings sections, categories, groups, etc.  Also possible to overwrite any value.

Global elements:

• visible – useful for assigning specific elements to specific platforms
• requirements – makes it so a setting is only visible when a requirement is met. For example, if zeroconf is available and turned on, other settings can appear
• parent  -
• levels – basic, standard, advanced, expert, internal (never visible, should never be changed)
• default – it is now possible to reset values back to “factory” default
• control – spinner, list, text input, defines how to input setting in gui
• constraints
• dependencies – Setting is only visible/enabled/etc. when other setting is enabled

11.00 AM

Statistics/ Public Relations

First topic of the day was stats. As noted on the Raspberry Pi blog, there are quite a lot of R-Pi users these days. It appears all that growth in Raspberry Pi and now Android appears to have fairly dramatically increased the number of XBMC users from last August to this August. The number is even higher in September.

A couple suggestions for the future. First, we should increase the number of blog posts so that we talk about already existing features in depth. Second, we should seriously consider making semi-official statements about hardware to give users better guidance.

Broadly speaking, more info is better.

Also, this t-shirt sale is going awesomely. With 3 days left, we’ve already sold between 3 and 4 times the minimum.

Development Cycle

Is our commit window too short in our development cycle? At the moment, the first 10 days of every month are open for new features and changes. The remainder of the month is set aside for fixes and stability. Is this too short? Too long?

The primary problem is reviewing. What happens if everything is fine on the 9th or 10th day, except for one or two things that only got pinged on review on the very last day? Do we have to wait until next month to merge?

Generally speaking, the agreement appears to be that the window is fine. The change ought to be that the coder and reviewer agree that maybe you enter the PR on the 10th, and then apply the minor fixes over the next few days.

Second, we need better info on who to ping for reviews. Perhaps actually creating a wiki page with reviewer names and project areas where they have knowledge/are experts in.

Jenkins, and the Jenkins test build system, is working really well.

Trac is something we’re all rapidly paying less attention to, which is honestly too bad, as bug reports are finally becoming manageable and verified. Later today, we’re going to review all the ~ 50 bugs that Martijn assigned to 13.0.