OpenFrameworks - room for improvement

[dimitre]

First of all thank you for the incredible project and collective effort put in OF.
I've been using for more than 10 years, and I've decided to read carefully the code to see if some things could be improved there.
And IMHO there are. so I'm opening this issue here and inviting you to discuss ideas or post new ones.

[roymacdonald]

Hi @dimitre
I agree with you. we discussed some of this things back on 2019 at the denver conference, but soon after covid came and, well, you know...

What I recall and think would be mostly useful was the idea of modularizing OF. Have a very basic core and all the rest is treated as addons, communications, networks, 3D, sound, video, graphics, etc. The way that OF is used right now will still be possible, but with this modularization one could easilly disable the modules that are not needed, which should compile faster and into smaller apps.
There were other things we mentioned and were written in some documents, which I think @bakercp own.
@ofTheo @ofZach @arturoc

What ideas do you have in mind?

[dimitre]

Hey @roymacdonald first of all thanks for all your activity in community helping others and keeping the forum alive.
Glad you posted, I'll be sharing more ideas here if there is discussion. Don't want to flood the project with PRs and issues.

[dimitre]

Fresh OF

First of all, some people out there I've been talking have the perception OF project is stalled.
I disagree but I've tried to navigate the project as I was a new user, using the site, documentation, search engines and there are some easy things that can be improved for users.

• certbot working for www pages, I've noticed some search engines tend to point to www pages which leads to a invalid certificate issue.
• push new ofsite commits to remove IRC / Forum list and add Slack
• release dates on the OF site
• a new release 0.11.3 to have all the latest improvements. Even without improvements it would worth the release only by the XCode / M1 compatibility efforts. I see forum posts and issues regarding already fixed things.

Edited some suggestions as already done as I've noticed recently

[roymacdonald]

Glad to help.
I also have the perception that OF is a bit stalled. There is a lot of people now using Touch Designer, for instance, which is really powerful and you can make super nice looking stuff quite fast, although there are lots of things you cant do in it that you can do with OF. But if I was a newcomer I would probably gravitate towards TD rather than OF.

I agree with what you point out. During the last OF conference in Denver, already more than 2 years ago, we discussed this a lot and we ended up having the idea of revamping the whole site, even with some working demos for it which looked really nice. I am kinda disappointed that all the work done there went into the dark and never came out. I understand that soon after it covid came and, well we all know what happened, yet after that there has been plenty of time to at least make public the documents we wrote then.

There were also some other really cool and useful stuff like the package manager by @thomasgeissl , which already works and the idea was to integrate with OF and project generator.

But in order to change this perception of OF being stalled, most probably, updating the website would have the biggest effect and maybe we should start from there.

I am willing to make an effort and put time into such, but we need to be clever on how to use out limited person/hour resources which are not that much. I think that organizing a hackathon during some weekend can work and we can get it all done if we have a few committed people .

[dimitre]

Sure @roymacdonald it would be great to have a way of sharing ideas and results from the conference, so others could pick up or add or discuss more.

[dimitre]

Folders naming and location

it would be great to change some parts of structure for a major version like 0.12.0
changing osx to macos in docs, scripts and templates

and moving templates to root, not inside scripts. it is just strange that this folder sits there, together with lots of .sh folders.

[ofTheo]

Just fyi @dimitre there is a 0.12.0 task-list issue here:
#6692

It outlines what we are aiming for, for 0.12.0.
Any easy fixes for anything on that list would be helpful. And anything that should go on that list can be added as a comment on the issue.

Thanks for all the help so far!
Feel free to PR any things on the ofSite that seem out of date or inaccurate.

[thomasgeissl]

hey hey, thanks for reaching out.

I am currently traveling and turns out train/bus rides work very well for refactoring.
I was discussing some package manager/project generator features with Theo a couple of months ago. Unfortunately, other gigs came in and I haven't found time to continue working on it.
Basically, I am simplifying things and porting the UI stuff to c++, with the hope that everyone who knows oF could work on the package manager.
The package manager now opens a gui when no arguments are specified, and if arguments are passed to it, it runs in cli mode (similar to npm). The current version is single standalone application (cli, gui, project generator), and if it is located in an oF installation, it does not require a setup step.
I wanna get things stable and then I could need some support fixing the last ofxProjectGenerator and ImGui issues.
Once it's at a stable state, i will post more information.

[roymacdonald]

That's looking great @thomasgeissl !
Is it made in OF or are you using something else?

[roymacdonald]

@dimitre
Why changing the templates folder? I rarely use it directly, and it is mostly called from project generator in order to make the projects. I feel that changes to the folder structure can be quite disruptive as there is so much interdependence between parts, in particular with scripts, but it would also bring backwards compatibility problems.

[dimitre]

Yeah this change is really not needed @roymacdonald.
I has only to do with personal opinion based on a didactic view of the project. The simpler is to understand what is done the more inviting is for collaboration, improvement in the future.

About backwards compatibility I don't think it is needed in this case, each release has its own projectGenerator

[2bbb]

I agree with dimitre's opinion about moving templates to root.
sometimes me and my friends say "where is the template directory...?".
even if scripts need templates, templates are not only for scripts, sometimes humans need to operate templates...

I think this is not absolutely needed, but I think it on the root directory is better.

[dimitre]

GIT Access

People commited to OF with availability should have access to GIT so innofensive PRs can be merged without overloading @ofTheo. It would be great to have @2bbb and @roymacdonald

[thomasgeissl]

That's looking great @thomasgeissl ! Is it made in OF or are you using something else?

hey Roy, it is entirely coded in oF. Your territory to find and fix some bugs.

I am with Roy regarding the templates, would be nice to move, but since it will cause a lot of problems, this should only happen with the next (real) major release - 1.0.0 in this case.
It is weird to have them in scripts, but it definitely mirrors the project's anarchic character.
I'd say it's a very low-priority task with lots of headaches.

[ofTheo]

@dimitre and all - thanks for this!

ofSite:
I think there is a lot to do here ( as you mentioned )

• Any PRs would be appreciated and we could definitely add more people to ofSite Git for merging easy fixes.
• Would also like to refresh the video on the homepage soon and do a call on the OF Twitter for video submissions.
• There were some designs that came out of the OF meetup which were pretty nice but I think that would be fair amount of work to implement.
• A slightly refreshed homepage with a new video and some updates to the site content would probably go a long way.

Next Release:

• Right now 0.12.0 is slated as the next release, but 0.11.3 could make sense if 0.12.0 feels too far off.
• Either way any help closing issues on the 0.12.0 task list would be amazingly helpful OF 0.12.0 Release Checklist #6692
• Commits could be pulled into a 0.11.3 if needed.
• One thing I'm working on at the moment is trying to get the release process a little simpler and using the Github Actions and Github Releases to make the process more automatic. Once that is working I think it could be a faster process to bring out patch releases.
• I think switching the folder structure could be doable for 0.12.0

Git Merging PRs:

• This could be opened up to more people. We'd need to sync up on a few things like "squash and merge" with #changelog notes.
• We would probably want to do something along the lines of one person with Git access has to review before someone else merges ( to start with ). In the past we had issues with buggy code or code only tested on one platform being merged and introducing new issues.
• A critical eye here would be important!
• Also PRs that move us closer to a Release should be prioritized over new features. If the feature is fairly critical it could be added to a release, but PRs that close existing issues/bugs and features marked for the next release are the most helpful.

Simplifying Contribution / Plaltforms:

• At the moment we have a lot of supported platforms which makes things get out of date pretty quickly if someone who has been supporting the platform steps away and there is no one else to jump in.
• It also makes development move slower. So would be great to look at things that aren't well supported or out of date.
• Dropping 32bit on Windows is one example, but there might be some other areas we might want to look at for simplification.
• I don't know a ton about arm based linux boards, but it could be that we could move say to one arm64 platform instead of armv6 and armv7 for future releases ( would support Rpi 3 and onwards ).
• Anyway would be great to think about ways we can simplify the supported platforms ( where reasonable ) as that could go a long way to help OF pick up steam.

Really appreciate all the energy and would love to help get more people involved in the process!
Theo

[dimitre]

@roymacdonald by having more people there able to commit, changes can be voted and tested there.
If people consent a specific change is better Theo can be involved in merging into master.

[dimitre]

Done: XCConfig optional include at the end

edit: now an issue here:

• Proposal : optional xcconfig per project #6997

it would be great to have something like
#include? "app.xcconfig"
in the end of the actual Project.xcconfig

so if somebody want to have configuations that survive ProjectGenerator rebuild they can be there
#include? doesn't complain if the file doesn't exist

useful for overwriting pbxproj or xcconfig configurations, or setting custom data for the app like

APP_VERSION = 0.76
PRODUCT_BUNDLE_IDENTIFIER = org.dmtr.testOF

[dimitre]

Done : Reducing .h includes in .h files.

There are some cases includes are there but they are unneeded (I've made some PRs targeting that but I'm sure there are more out there) and others can be changed to forward declaration like this :

• remove ofRectangle include #6982

[smeyfroi]

Re improvements to ofSite, I wonder if scraping the Instagram #openframeworks tag might be a quick win? I noticed there's a feed from Twitter, but perhaps Insta would have better results. Having said that I have no idea how easy it is to take a feed from Insta. Maybe it's really complicated, but thought I'd mention.

[ofTheo]

@smeyfroi Yeah would love to feature more OF work on the main site. Another option could be behance which has a fair amount of OF content: https://www.behance.net/search/projects?tracking_source=typeahead_search_direct&search=openframeworks&sort=published_date

Edit: added an issue here for those that have thoughts
openframeworks/ofSite#794

[smeyfroi]

What's the best way for me to start helping this project? @ofTheo @ofZach

I'm time poor in general, quite new to oF, but willing to help with tasks that are easily within my grasp.

So... I'm mediocre in C++, picking it up again specifically to use oF after last using it commercially in the days of C++98! I'm studying for an art degree in my spare time, with a day job in software (currently ruby, bash, some js, previously python, java), though I mostly spend my work hours managing a decent sized AWS estate.

One reason I'm nervous about the oF codebase is because of its highly cross-platform nature. I wonder whether the implications of that re development could be documented more clearly, because for me that's quite a barrier: last time I touched Windows was probably decades ago, and my knowledge of low-level graphics ops is minimal at best, never mind thinking about the differences between a Pi and a MacBook. I imagine CI automation might be the answer there, if that's a reliable enough setup.

I find the issues list overwhelming, though clearly it's not stopping @dimitre! 👍 I wonder whether I might be best starting to help triage the issues (tagging/re-tagging to bucket them up), or if there's anything I can do around the hosting and so on?

A successful repo that I sort of follow is the neovim project. They have a lot of active participants on what must be a very difficult legacy codebase. Yet they've managed to refactor, excise legacy, and add complex new functionality. Is their model for managing the dev process something to look at? (They tag and triage issues quite nicely, for example.)

Anyway, I'm making no grand promises, but it'd be handy to have a way into helping with whatever limited resource I can give.

Feel free to DM: email on my GH profile. 😀

[ofTheo]

Thanks @smeyfroi !
Appreciate the offer to jump in :)

Things that can be helpful to the project:

• answering questions on the forum
• helping with the site ( if you are able to get some example iframe / embed code snippets for behance or instagram or way to pull in images would be really helpful )
• reporting bugs

[dimitre]

Great.
Another suggestion of useful collaboration would be proofreading and/or testing pull requests.
like @NickHardeman just did in this one - #6987

[smeyfroi]

Great. PR incoming for ofSite to start, but I'll start engaging on this repo too. Thanks guys!

[dimitre]

Libs version / URL in a log file

it would be great to have a txt file in the libs folder contaning info for each lib:

• lib version
• git url (branch / fork)
  it can be generated by the same process that build the libs.

[dimitre]

Github Discussions

it would be great to have the feature discussions enabled in Github, so some issues can be moved there
Like this https://github.com/plotdevice/plotdevice/discussions

[ofTheo]

@dimitre yes - if you want to kick it off happy to add that. 👍

I think we want to make sure though to use it in a way that makes sense, so we aren't duplicating conversations in issues / or the forum.

[dimitre]

@ofTheo great! As I've seem some issues being moved to discussions we can do it without duplicating anything.

[dimitre]

@ofTheo just as a follow up I don't have access to repository settings here.
from what I've seen in other repositories this can be enabled in settings -> General, scroll to features -> [ ] discussion

[dimitre]

idea: moving ofConstants.h to be in openFrameworks folder together with ofMain.h