PlanetCCRMA vs. Agnula vs. Fedora Music etc.

[Kyrian]

Folks,

Apropos of this fedora music spin, it would probably be good if someone 
could clarify how it all fits together, what's (in terms of package 
sources, websites, etc) deprecated, what's currently relevant, etc. I'm 
still on the PlanetCCRMA list(s), but I seem to recall Agnula somehow 
morphing into that, and now I'm just horribly confused about what's what.

Even just a reply to this message would allow for it to show up in 
Google and hence help people who search on the subject.

K.

[Fernando Lopez-Lezcano]

On 03/18/2012 12:21 PM, Kyrian wrote:
>  Folks,
>
>  Apropos of this fedora music spin, it would probably be good if someone
>  could clarify how it all fits together, what's (in terms of package
>  sources, websites, etc) deprecated, what's currently relevant, etc. I'm
>  still on the PlanetCCRMA list(s), but I seem to recall Agnula somehow
>  morphing into that, and now I'm just horribly confused about what's what. 
Indeed, a bit confused :-)

Planet CCRMA was a side effect of CCRMA (the Center for Computer 
Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University) migrating to and 
using Linux for audio early in the game (I created and maintained it 
from the very beginning). It was announced in September 2001, and it was 
(and still is) a collection of rpm packages that you can add to Fedora - 
back then packages you could add to RedHat. Planet CCRMA packaged pretty 
much all relevant audio apps for Linux at the time, used ALSA for sound 
way before RedHat did, has had RT patched kernels for a LONG time, and 
even used dependency resolution software for very easy installs (apt for 
rpm) before RedHat started using yum (at a time that "dependency hell" 
was associated with the word "rpm"), etc, etc.

Over the years many packages have migrated (and keep migrating) to 
Fedora. Not all packages have migrated, so Planet CCRMA is still 
relevant (I hope) and will be for some time. When all packages have 
migrated to Fedora and the RT patches are no longer needed to get great 
latencies from a stock kernel, Planet CCRMA will cease to exist and I'll 
recover another BIG chunk of my time from the black hole of software 
packaging and repository building :-)

Agnula, on the other hand, was an European Community funded project that 
took on Demudi, a Debian based distribution that appeared at about the 
same time as Planet CCRMA (circa 2001). Version "0" of Demudi was 
announced in ICMC 2001, Cuba. See this paper:
   http://smcnetwork.org/node/1028
for more details on the story of Agnula (this was written after funding 
for Agnula ended). I don't think Agnula exists today, so it is not 
relevant although the work that was done was not lost and migrated to 
Debian proper over time (just as Planet CCRMA is moving to Fedora).

(as a side note: the Agnula project also funded RedHat France to build 
an rpm based counterpart to Demudi - called "Rehmudi", that had a short 
life span that started by them just downloading all the binary packages 
I had built and calling that Rehmudi without even saying thanks or 
mentioning me - they fixed that a bit after I complained, and it 
obviously this did upset me at the time, ha ha :-)

So, in short, Agnula was the umbrella organization for the Demudi 
(Debian based) and Rehmudi (RedHat based) distributions. Neither 
migrated from nor merged with Planet CCRMA, which never aspired to be a 
"distribution" but just a cool collection of packages that would be easy 
to install and configure, and would transform RedHat and then Fedora 
into a proper "professional" audio install.

Planet CCRMA was just an internal repository of packages before it was 
publicly available, we actually used all of them at CCRMA in our 
everyday research and music creation activities (that's why I packaged 
them in the first place, it was much easier to install and maintain all 
the software in our workstations). It existed and continues to exist 
thanks to CCRMA's continued support of Linux as a research and audio 
platform.

>  Even just a reply to this message would allow for it to show up in
>  Google and hence help people who search on the subject. 
Oh well, not so short. Maybe I should write something more detailed 
before I forget :-)
-- Fernando

[Fernando Lopez-Lezcano]

On 03/18/2012 06:52 PM, Fernando Lopez-Lezcano wrote:
>  On 03/18/2012 12:21 PM, Kyrian wrote:
> > Folks,
> >
> > Apropos of this fedora music spin, it would probably be good if someone
> > could clarify how it all fits together, what's (in terms of package
> > sources, websites, etc) deprecated, what's currently relevant, etc. I'm
> > still on the PlanetCCRMA list(s), but I seem to recall Agnula somehow
> > morphing into that, and now I'm just horribly confused about what's what.
>
>  Indeed, a bit confused :-)
>
>  Planet CCRMA was a side effect of CCRMA (the Center for Computer
>  Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University) migrating to and
>  using Linux for audio early in the game (I created and maintained it
>  from the very beginning). 
...

I should have also included:
   https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~nando/publications/planetccrma_icmc2002.pdf
   https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~nando/publications/planetccrma_icmc2005.pdf
as references...
-- Fernando