Coral future development

[Faizol]

Hi all,

  I just found out about Coral (reading about it on Softimage mailing list) - yeah, silly me for not knowing about this great project. Anyway, reading this mailing list gives me an impression that Coral is no longer being actively developed? Is there a roadmap somewhere designed by the maintainers?

  Also, there was a suggestion of using Coral with llvm. What are changes needed to be done to make it happen? I'm planning to spend some time to experiment with it.

  Thanks.

  cheers,
  Faizol

[Constantine Tarasenkov]

Hi, Faizol. Ask Andrea Interguglielmi, he is a Coral creator, I didn't use llvm before.

As far as I know, Andrea found a full time job and can't devote a lot of time to develop Coral.

I'm just made a site with how-to-build instructions for the project, now I should learn code more to make something useful with it.

2012/9/9 Faizol <faizo...@gmail.com>

--
Constantine Tarasenkov

http://procedural.tumblr.com/

[Dorian Fevrier]

Coral sent a mail explaining the coral situation, hope this help:


Object: Coral's code, what's left undone and how it could go forward.


This post is just a recap on the state of things with coral's code base at this moment in time, should anybody be willing to keep developing it privately or to contribute to the main repo.

What's left undone:
- The python bindings are not complete, you might find a method is missing or it can't be overridden in a python subclass.
I used to bind things as I would run into the need for them, this has proven to be a nice way to progressively add coverage and avoid undertaking the tedious task of binding everything in one go (and risking in introducing lots of bugs).

- The core is not as "vanilla" as it should be.
The default set of nodes that are compiled and loaded by default in coral's core are too CGI related, some of them also introduce dependencies that would not be mandatory otherwise.
Fortunately, even these built-in nodes are just part of a plug-in that just happens to be loaded at startup, such plug-in should be compiled as a separate module and only loaded optionally.

- Collapsed-node referencing:
A network can be collapsed in a single node and then saved and reused many times, however, if one is to modify the content of such node he won't see all the other instances update accordingly.

- Compiling coral is a pain in the butt:
It'd be great to have the dependencies already compiled for the main platforms and ready for the build process, thus not requiring users to go through the build and install process of all those libraries.

Going forward:
Integrating patches and coordinating an open source project is quite a bit of work, I surely can't do it while my day job forces me to do other stuff and imposes restrictions on what I can do on my spare time.
The project needs a new maintainer, not a single individual, but a studio that understands the benefits of sponsoring an open platform and that can drive development forward in a real production scenario.

For anything else, I'll be here to keep helping anyone who wants to explore the code base to take or learn what they need.

Thanks,
Andrea

[Muhamad Faizol Abd. Halim]

Hi,
  Thanks for the reply. Probably the best thing for me to do is to update the developer documentation, status of each class or module progress (and the project overall), milestones and so on. That way it would be convenient for anyone who wants to start working on the existing code base. Do you have a rough development note somewhere that I can use to reproduce a more complete developer documentation?

Cheers,
Faizol

[Constantine Tarasenkov]

There is a Doxyfile in the source code folder, install Doxygen and generate sdk with it. Here is generated version for convenience: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/10965660/coral_site/download/sdk.rar

2012/9/10 Muhamad Faizol Abd. Halim <faizo...@gmail.com>