[Fedora-music-list] Package and Revise the Musicians' Guide

Tue Feb 21 15:04:04 UTC 2012

On 02/21/2012 04:09 AM, Christopher R. Antila wrote:
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> Greetings to the list:
>

Thanks again for the effort  Chris, I haven't looked into the guide too 
closely as yet but I've made some quick comments below to get the 
discussion rolling.

> ==== Packaging ====
> The Musicians' Guide has been published since Fedora 14. I think, when
> Brendan says he wants to "package" it, he wants an RPM version that
> users can download and access without an active Internet connection.
> Nobody has done this yet.
>
> For most of the Guides, this isn't particularly useful. That's why (I
> think) only the Release Notes are packaged. Theoretically, everybody
> should read the Release Notes. For most of the other documentation,
> it's not as useful to have an RPM package. I'm not even sure whether
> the Release Notes are packaged any more.
>
> The Musicians' Guide is a little different. There are a lot of extra
> media files that go along with the tutorial exercises, and it would be
> handy for users to download all the media files at once. I'm not sure
> of the best way to deliver these files--maybe even separately from the
> documentation, or separately from each other--but RPM packages would
> be useful.
I agree, probably if we could store them all in 
/usr/share/doc/<package-name> that would be a good start.
>
> I would really appreciate somebody else's help in taking care of the
> packaging issue, so I can spend my time on the list below.
>
> ==== Revising ====
> These have always been problems, but they're more prominent if an
> Audio Spin or RPM package draws attention to the documentation.
>
> 1.) Official Fedora documentation shouldn't recommend and provide
> instructions for installing non-Fedora package repositories. There's a
> chapter about the real-time kernel and the Planet CCRMA repository.
> This is also an issue because it involves/recommends a lot of manual
> tweaking that tends to break between releases. I'm fine with just
> leaving this, but it must be tested.

If we could at least provide a URL to something that is hosted on CCRMA 
then we achieve the same end?

>
> 2.) Related to the previous point, Qtractor and SuperCollider are only
> available from the RPMFusion and Planet CCRMA repositories,
> respectively. Depending on what we do about point (1), we could just
> remove those chapters until the Qtractor and SuperCollider make it
> into the official repositories. Ideally, only the rt-kernel would live
> at Planet CCRMA (as far as "things in the Musicians' Guide" go).

 From what I understand a supercollider release is imminent which should 
make it a whole lot easier to package. Fernando has already been playing 
around with this - when this is release we can pull it into Fedora.

Qtractor on the other hand has licensing issues due to MP3 support. IT 
is now possible to build without MP3 support, but I'm unsure as how best 
to approach this as we would still want MP3 support in rpmfusion. Maybe 
we can package its as qtractor-good in Fedora? Perhaps Orcan can chime 
in here.

There are also some packages currently on review (lilv, suil) which 
incorporate some of the newer development in the LV2 world. Qtractor is 
not currently built against these packages but it is supported. I will 
revisit this once we have the required dependencies in Fedora.

>
> 3.) I didn't finish some of the tutorials, so they don't have examples
> of the completed project. I want to rewrite a few of those with new
> content anyway. The Ardour tutorial is particularly questionable; it
> doesn't have a completed version *and* I don't know if the setup
> process even works for other people.
>
> 4.) The Qtractor tutorial relies on a copyrighted sound recording that
> isn't freely available on the Internet. It's also not included. Easy
> fix: adjust the tutorial to use a recording, even of the same music,
> that we can redistribute.
>
> 5.) Here's the best one! The Audacity tutorial is made with fragments
> of a copyrighted sound recording that *are* included. My understanding
> of copyright law at the time suggested it would be okay, because the
> fragments are short, because it is impossible to reconstruct the
> original content from the fragments, and because it is intended merely
> for private, educational purposes (learning how to use Audacity).
>
> I have since realized that, even though these factors may apply, it
> won't necessarily stop an organization from filing a lawsuit.
> Packaging these fragments makes it worse, and including them on live
> media for a Spin makes it worse still. This point also has an easy
> solution: start with fragments that we can redistribute. We wouldn't
> even have to rewrite the tutorial... just do all of the same things
> with the new fragments.

Probably should avoid this kind of complication I agree.

>
> 6.) There's a "to-do" list in the comments at the bottom of the
> Revision_History.xml file of the Guide's repository.[0]
>
> 7.) There are also a few issues on Bugzilla, including some patches
> that should be incorporated.
>
> 8.) Then of course I complain about my writing quality. Everything
> needs to be copy-edited.
>
> In short, other contributors' help would be greatly appreciated. Let's
> get crackin'!

I'll help where I can.

>
>
> Christopher.
>
> [0] https://fedorahosted.org/musicians-guide/
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