Nanacore

Six machines. Six plus one equals seven. My current laptop is named Reicore, where rei れい is a possible reading of zero in Japanese.

It was only fitting that the seventh machine—a desktop—would be Nanacore (nana なな) then.

Quite notably, everything is working fine with the latest Debian wheezy packages (although I compiled my own newer kernel later anyway) except for the onboard sound controller.

00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller (rev 04)

The Intel HDA codec for these controllers is apparently not quite ready yet; as a result, the mixer sliders are slightly broken in that there is no master channel, the speaker channel has no actual volume slider, changing the PCM channel’s volume causes some slight noise, and I suspect some features are missing as well. Despite this, the driver works for basic usage given some precautions with the KDE sound system to choose the correct (PCM) channel for audio instead of the sliderless (speaker) channel. I would not mind to spend some additional time researching the situation later, but I really need to get back to work on non-audio stuff (a.k.a. AtS) right now, so that will have to wait.

Incidentally, the Debian KDE desktop task includes PulseAudio now (I believe this wasn’t the case with Squeeze). Rather unsurprisingly, PA continues to be a considerable annoyance for my usage (e.g. lockup during KDE login, 1% extra CPU usage during playback from any application), so I ditched it after a day or two for plain ALSA. I don’t really have a need for the extra layer of indirection since PA uses ALSA anyway and my sound needs are very basic — basically, just playing sound from media players, games, and application notifications.

For graphics I’m using a decidedly inexpensive NVIDIA graphics card for the sake of having an NVIDIA graphics card and parting ways with Mesa for a good while. And while I had intended from the get-go to install the proprietary drivers, a forced and thankfully short Nouveau intermission confirmed that Nouveau indeed eats kittens. And that’s really all there is to say on the matter.

Both the machine and Debian wheezy can do UEFI, but I quickly stumbled upon a couple of issues:

• Using the EFI version of GRUB means the only way to get a working text console on Linux is to use a framebuffer console driver such as efifb. This is not supported by NVIDIA and the driver complains quite loudly about it.
• The machine appears to enumerate my (USB) 3G modem’s built-in storage as the first and second hard disks when it is connected, breaking GRUB’s expectations about the location of the disk from which it will boot, which becomes the third (SATA) hard disk in such a situation. The PC BIOS version of GRUB only gets to see the real hard disk drive.

Since this is my first time dealing with an UEFI-based system yet, I don’t really know whether the second point is a bug in GRUB, or the platform itself. Regardless, the first point pretty much convinced me to not spend any further time on that and just go back to the BIOS flavor of GRUB. This doesn’t seem to have done anything for my broken Windows 7 installation, which I probably don’t really need.

I have been working on transferring my configuration and files from Reicore since this Monday, approximately, and I think I’m nearly ready to get back to business now.

(I actually wanted to post this on the 7th but I got sidetracked by the system migration and testing.)

My short inventory and history of personal computing devices

First there was an old (1997) Windows 95 OSR 2 box boasting a P55C Intel Pentium processor with an staggering clock frequency of 166 MHz; 16 MiB of RAM (later expanded to 32), a 1.2 GB* hard disk; it had an onboard S3 Trio64V+ with 1 MiB of video RAM.

Then, there was another OEM machine (2002), running Windows XP on a 1.3 GHz Intel Celeron (“Celeron-S”) including 256 MiB of RAM and a 40 GB hard disk; before it was decommissioned for good, it ran both Windows XP SP2 and openSUSE 10.0; it was the first machine on which I ever installed Linux (SUSE Linux 9.3), and my original introduction to Wesnoth (0.9.5 from openSUSE 10.0) happened there; the onboard Intel 810E IGP became the victim of various Linux graphics-related shenanigans. (This was the last computer I ever owned that included a 3.5" floppy disk drive; unfortunately, it was broken and it took me a year and various casualties to figure this out.)

Later during 2006, Blackcore appeared: another OEM machine running Windows XP SP2, equipped with a 2.6 GHz Intel Pentium 4 (Prescott) with Hyper-Threading; 1 GiB of RAM, a 160 GB hard disk, and an IGP from the biggest piece of shit chipset manufacturer otherwise known as VIA. This was my first named computer, a practice which has truly paid off to this day. It currently runs the same original installation of Windows XP upgraded to SP3; it has run various Linux distributions and versions and I’ve not stuck with any of them simply because VIA is the biggest piece of shit chipset manufacturer.

Following the color-themed naming scheme, Greycore became the first laptop I ever owned around mid 2007; an Acer Aspire 5050 including an AMD Turion 64 MK-36, an amount of RAM I don’t remember anymore, 80 GiB hard disk drive, and Windows Vista. It first ran openSUSE 10.2 and openSUSE 10.3 besides Windows for a long time, until I got fed up with an incident involving a security update utterly ruining my system with terrible timing. It took a while before I finally decided to switch to another distribution instead of keeping the same old 10.3 installation around, but it was worth it — Debian Lenny (testing at the time, Q3 2008) was my choice and I have stuck with Debian ever since.

Greycore was decommissioned once Bluecore took over; an HP Pavilion dv5-1132la running Windows Vista SP1. It was a much better deal than Greycore in the long term, as I acquired it on Christmas Eve 2008 and it lasted until January 2011 with mild wearing symptoms until it finally kicked the bucket (it got better later); Greycore did not last more than a year before it got utterly wrecked.

Bluecore started with 2 GiB of RAM and ended up with 4 GiB as Wesnoth began to demand significantly more memory for compiling. The 2 GHz dual core AMD Athlon 64 performed very well at the beginning, but our favorite open source game’s development largely outpaced it. The 250 GB hard disk served me well despite running into low space situations in various opportunities as I began to experiment with the processor’s hardware-assisted virtualization capabilities. This overheating beast (51 °C - 64 °C idle, 65 °C - 92 °C under load) has only run Debian as its native operating system besides Windows — first Lenny (testing, later stable), then Squeeze (testing), and very recently, Wheezy (testing). The ATI Radeon HD 3200 was an infinite source of frustration when it came to OpenGL on Linux until very late 2009.

Its untimely and infuriatingly IGP-driven demise resulted in Reicore taking over; first temporarily, and then permanently as its 2.1 GHz dual core Intel Pentium T4300 and Intel GM45 graphics processor ended up proving far more worthwhile than Bluecore’s AMD-based configuration. Reicore (an HP Pavilion dv4-1624la) was purchased for someone else at first, and ran Windows 7 until she became mine, and then I proceeded to wipe it out to make room for Debian — first Squeeze (stable), and now Wheezy (testing). I have never run out of space with its 500 GB hard disk, and even today my /home partition has a little more than 50% of free space. It helps that the processor’s lack of virtualization capabilities has not been very encouraging in the virtual machine department, I guess.

Notes to self (Debian wheezy dist-upgrade)

For my own consideration in the future:

• Bluecore’s DVD drive is ruined and I need to find a way to make the Linux kernel shut up about it.
• apt-cacher doesn’t play well with slow download rate uplinks.
• Dismissing maintainer-suggested /etc/sudoers changes is highly inadvisable:

  dpkg: warning: 'ldconfig' not found in PATH or not executable
  dpkg: warning: 'start-stop-daemon' not found in PATH or not executable
  dpkg: error: 2 expected programs not found in PATH or not executable

• The Giant Blinking Cursor of Doom has not stopped being a thing that exists and is decidedly annoying and disruptive during reboot sequences.
• Purging grub-pc during unused package removal binges... I have had better ideas.

On Wesnoth’s Game Development forum

From a recent topic in Wesnoth.org’s Game Development forum:

[...] this is also quite close to advertisement, but you don't have the traits of a spammer.

This is one of my major qualms about the current organization of the Wesnoth.org forums. The non-indicative Game Development section was indeed created for that specific purpose of serving as a venue for advertising other games and potentially recruiting contributors. The definition of spam for this section is sketchy at best, but common sense suggests that the following forms of promotion would be off-limits:

• Advertising things that are not games
• Blatant advertising by posting links to different topics
• Misleading information/scam

If advertising in GD in general was considered spam, then the forum would be nearly or entirely empty. The question is, why do we provide this marketing channel in the first place? It seems to me like the primary goal is promoting open-source game development, but the forum description implies that this is not a strict requirement for posting there. I am not terribly comfortable with the idea that it should be our mission to do this seeing as how there are larger and better organized communities for this kind of thing, but I can see how some people might prefer to have means to preach to the world at large without having to maintain a blog or register accounts on other boards.

Quite lazy, if you ask me.

But all this is fine by me as long as I’m not forced to read every single topic that crops up in there.

irker-svnpoller: Subversion poller and mail filter application for irker

Just as irker’s adoption rate is increasing, I have just completed work on a very simple application for Subversion repositories — two applications, in fact.

irker-svnpoller is a very simple script that polls a single commit log (not data) from a Subversion repository and delivers notifications to any number of channels using an irkerd running on the same host. It mimics the CIA bots’ formatting, much like nenolod’s irker CIA proxy, from which I borrowed a small amount of code.

irker-svnpoller → irkerd

But exactly how is this supposed to be useful to anyone, you may be wondering right now? Well, irker-svnpoller is not really intended to be used stand-alone. A timed poller script that tracks the last notified revision could come in handy, but people could get impatient waiting for their commits to appear in their IRC channels minutes later. I am well familiarized with the defects, quirks, and virtues of my primary audience—the Battle for Wesnoth and Wesnoth-UMC-Dev projects—and this approach would simply not scale well over time.

Enter the first companion script, svnmail-filter. It reads email message headers from stdin to determine a commit’s revision number and the pertinent repository to probe using irker-svnpoller. Configuration is mostly done through a ruleset file using the JSON format.

Of course, svnmail-filter is not that useful on its own either. The idea is that procmail or some other MDA should pipe incoming email headers through svnmail-filter — and preferably, only those from legitimate sources, such as subscribed commit mailing lists. This is actually simpler than it sounds, and it is more or less inspired by CIA.vc’s perpetually broken mail-based SVN poller.

MDA → svnmail-filter → irker-svnpoller → irkerd

Since no service in the pipeline other than irkerd runs persistently in the background, this should be significantly more fault-resilient than CIA.vc’s approach, which apparently required a poller service to listen and act upon local requests. The downside is that the host running irker-svnpoller may need to create many short-lived SVN repository connections for individual commits in a chain. In Wesnoth’s case, SVN commit chains are rare enough, but their size often goes around a dozen individual commits or so. Regardless, this shouldn’t be terribly concerning for a production server with a decent low-latency uplink, and the overhead on the repository provider should be rather small compared to pushing massive commit diffs across the network.

Right now, the Wesnoth and Wesnoth-UMC-Dev projects are using this service as a stopgap measure until their respective providers—Gna.org and SourceForge.net—allow installing a hook that can either talk directly to an irkerd server, or to an instance of the aforementioned CIA proxy using the CIA XML-RPC method.

I am not all that keen on other people using a piece of software I developed and tested within less than three days without any prior experience working with Python. There are also various problems inherent to any application depending upon Subversion and its incompetent network transport layer.

Nonetheless, I published a Git repository on GitHub including a small amount of documentation to get started:

• irydacea/irker-svnpoller on GitHub

I am open to possible improvements coming from people intending to use this on production servers. In particular, if someone out there works with a commit mailing list where revision numbers can’t be found in mail subjects it would be necessary to adapt svnmail-filter a little to handle that case. Perhaps it might even be possible to skip the irker-svnpoller step for mailing lists where the notification message structure is constant and well documented.

Exit CIA.vc, enter irker

Following CIA.vc’s untimely demise, ESR and a small ad hoc group of coders and testers including nenolod (from Atheme) and our very own AI0867 (who has led Wesnoth-UMC-Dev in my absence) finally completed the work required to get irker 1.0 out. irker itself has been a work in progress for a while since the last CIA outage in August.

It’s advertised as a CIA.vc replacement, but in reality it is something far less ambitious in scope: a write-only IRC bot that serves its own message bus. From its own README:

irkerd is a specialized IRC client that runs as a daemon, allowing other programs to ship IRC notifications by sending JSON objects to a listening socket.

It is meant to be used by hook scripts in version-control repositories, allowing them to send commit notifications to project IRC channels. A hook script, irkerhook.py, supporting git and Subversion is included in the dustribution (sic); see the install.txt file for installation instructions.

The author’s intention is for existing code forges to adopt this service, and perhaps optionally run it on their own facilities alongside their VCSes, allowing repository admins to opt in for using hooks that deliver notifications to those internal irker instances. irker’s pipeline is extremely flexible and can be summed up as follows:

Repository hook → irker instance → IRC server

CIA.vc’s pipeline is not entirely clear to me and I did not have the opportunity to inspect it from inside, unlike ESR. However, there’s enough evidence suggesting that it was more or less like the following:

Repository hook → CIA.vc XML-RPC or mail provider → CIA.vc database manager → IRC front-end → IRC server

Note that there was also a web front-end, which was integral to CIA’s mission as it was the only way to define projects and bots. A commit notification occurred for a given project; say, Wesnoth-UMC-Dev. The IRC portion of the pipeline made sure that all relevant bots (each one associated to a single channel from the model standpoint) would report the same commit. A less relevant Web front-end in the pipeline took care of adding the commit to the project page (including statistics and an XML feed).

The IRC portion was flexible enough to accommodate the simplest use case (notifying a single project’s commits in a single channel), and more elaborate yet still reasonable use cases (notifying commits from multiple projects in a single channel) without much hassle, all done by tweaking the bots’ configuration in the web-based configuration front-end. Even more advanced use cases were possible by choosing the Advanced Filtering option in the same front-end. This allowed me to have a bot in ##shadowm on freenode report commits as follows:

• Commits from wesnoth-umc-dev (already reported in #wesnoth-umc-dev) with paths matching */After_the_Storm/* and */Invasion_from_the_Unknown/*, regardless of author
• Commits from my own CIA-registered projects (morningstar, weldyn, dorset, etc.) regardless of author
• Commits from any other CIA-registered project (such as Wesnoth or Frogatto) with an author matching my real name or any of my preferred screen names (fun fact: never got any false positives since I set it up a couple of years ago)

I should emphasize that this required no changes to hooks in each repository. Hooks delivered just a minimal set of information, including the commit hash or number, the commit message, affected path, affected branch (when applicable), affected module (when applicable), the author name, and the project name. Everything else was done on CIA’s side, including deciding which channels should get notified of individual commits.

irker does not do this.

irker’s perceived elegance stems from its very basic and versatile design. Essentially, it serves as a mechanism for a repository hook to interact with IRC without having to establish a short-lived connection to a server for every individual commit or commit batch — an approach that GitHub currently allows via a separate, seldom used IRC service hook. irker is not novel in design by any means, and the hype around it is only justified by the fact that nobody bothered to create and advertise any other service that could properly replace CIA.vc before and be inherently extensible maintainable over time.<

irker’s extensibility and maintainability stems from the fact that a good portion of the work is done by the repository hooks, and irker is near completely stateless — the obvious opposite of CIA.vc’s architecture.

Unfortunately, this renders advanced use cases such as the above ##shadowm CIA ruleset completely incompatible with the irker pipeline.

From ESR’s post on CIA.vc’s design and its shortcomings:

[...] the original designer fell in love with the idea of data-mining and filtering the notification stream. It is quite visible on the CIA site how much of the code is concerned with automatically massaging the commit stream into pretty reports. I’m told there is a complicated and clever feature involving XML rewrite rules that allows one to filter commit reports from any number of projects by the file subtrees they touch, then aggregate the result into a synthetic notification channel distinct from any of the ones those projects declared themselves.

(He somehow got this part slightly wrong. Incidentally, it was me who brought it up in #cia around August 25th in the first place. The projects’ own notification channels were as synthetic as any others from CIA.vc’s point of view. That is to say, not at all. Additionally, they weren’t XML rewrite rules, but rather commit matching rules.)

His opinion is, naturally...

Bletch! Bloat, feature creep, and overkill!

Yes, I admit that it is overkill, but it was a nice thing from our point of view as users of the system. There’s a line between using a service, and administrating it.

On the plus side, seeing as how irker aims to become an actual standard for IRC feeds of any sort (not just for VCSes), it is good that it only implements the most basic functionality by itself. This should later allow us to come up with ingenious applications such as nenolod’s CIA proxy for irker (delivers CIA.vc XML-RPC requests in a format suitable for irker). Some people have even proposing building new services using irker’s protocol, adding an authentication layer on top and integrating it to IRC networks as a hosted service!

But replicating the end-user functionality a few people like me enjoyed will invariably take some additional effort. ESR suggests:

Filtering? Aggregation? As previously noted, they don’t need to be in the transmission path. One or more IRC bots could be watching #commits, generating reports visible on the web, and aggregating synthetic feeds. The only agreement needed to make this happen is minimal regularity in the commit message formats that the hooks ship to IRC, which is really no more onerous than the current requirement to gin up an XML-RPC blob in a documented format.

Of course, if the #commits channel on freenode ever regains its former glory, this would require a bot to listen to and filter possibly thousands of messages per minute, all coming from multiple clients. I don’t think I am fit to become the pioneer who’ll conquer this new land.

Furthermore, since the task of formatting messages for individual commits is exclusive to individual hooks, we may end up with a highly fragmented and inconsistent ecosystem. For example, as things stand right now, no-one is required to include #commits on freenode as a destination for commit notifications, and I imagine very few people will bother to do so in the future.

All in all, it was our own incompetence that allowed CIA.vc to die prematurely despite the multiple calls for replacing it, and the obviously deplorable service conditions. We can’t really complain now.

CIA.vc is dead

I normally don’t comment or report on other sites’ statuses in here since this is my personal blog, but this situation actually impacts Wesnoth, Wesnoth-UMC-Dev, and me directly; especially me, considering I went to ridiculous lengths the other day to solve a related issue on GitHub.

The point is literally the title of this post: CIA.vc is dead.

You know, CIA.vc; that amazing service which provided real-time VCS commit notifications on various IRC networks and that everyone took for granted. This is by no means the first time it bites the dust, but in this opportunity it’s suspected that nobody really bothered to make backups.

nenolod (who was merely hosting the instance running CIA.vc) explained the situation in freenode’s #cia channel about an hour ago.

Assuming the other people who had admin access don’t have their own recent backups, CIA.vc’s future looks particularly bleak right now. Here’s hoping that a dedicated team of competent coders with access to a suitable server for hosting will quickly build a better replacement within the next few days. (Ha, ha, ha. Right.)

GitHub and long CIA commit notifications

Ever since I started using GitHub I have been greatly bothered by the questionable design decision of sending only the first line of a commit message to CIA.vc — the service that allows us to get instant commit notifications on IRC channels. For people using Git like it was intended to be used, this means you will only see the subject line for each commit in your CIA notifications and the web feed.

That’s not my only reservation about GitHub’s custom CIA hook’s design, in fact. It also limits the amount of notifications sent per push to five; more commits than that get notified as a single commit along with a “(+n more commits)” notice in the message. While everyone knows that CIA is broken by design and all, it just doesn’t feel right to me that GitHub should be in charge of manipulating notifications to avoid flooding and all. Whatever, I say.

Regardless of CIA’s perpetual state of brokenness, there is something that it currently does right. CIA bots won’t flood a channel with more than a few message lines per commit. One could then assume that this renders GitHub’s single-line commit notifications entirely pointless, but there might be people who really want their CIA bot to behave like a continuous git log --format=oneline run without figuring out a complicated CIA formatting ruleset specification.

I am definitely not part of that crowd, but I respect people’s right to choose, so I decided to provide them with the choice to get full commit messages sent to CIA.vc. The relevant pull request has just been accepted.

This is what the CIA hook configuration looks like in production now:

I have gone and enabled the option for every repository I currently host at GitHub that’s already using the hook. If you really care about proper Git commit message formatting (or merging commits from people who do) and you are also using CIA, I urge you do the same.

It should be noted that the single commit in that pull request is my very first attempt at writing code in Ruby at all.

Wesnoth RCX 0.2.1

A new release of Wesnoth RCX is now available for download!

Downloads

• Source code: wesnoth-rcx-0.2.1.tar.bz2 (Bzip2 tarball, 106.8 KiB)
  SHA1 checksum: ed114fb2776254a89491c0c014efb6da500693e0
• Windows: wesnoth-rcx-0.2.1-win32.zip (Zip archive, 4.9 MiB)
  SHA1 checksum: e6ed82f6a914d52a799527637562bfb4f5baa61b
• Mac OS X: wesnoth-rcx-0.2.1.dmg (Application image, 16.7 MiB)
  SHA1 checksum: 221c0006ce8beed5d81f4a9637629a12d4fe0730
  Contributed by Alarantalara.

New in this version

Shortly after 0.2.0 was released, it was brought to my attention that it wouldn’t compile against Qt versions older than 4.8.0, even though the documentation says it should work with version 4.6.0 and later. I quickly amended that and published a patch (found amongst the 0.2.0 downloads in the previous announcement) addressing those issues. That patch is obviously no longer necessary, since the compatibility changes are integrated in 0.2.1 and later. Furthermore, I now have easy access to a build environment using 4.6 to ensure such a situation does not occur again.

A well known issue at the time 0.2.0 was released was some rather excessive memory usage when zooming in, especially for large pictures. 0.2.1 solves this by using a more conservative approach for zooming; in a particular case this decreases memory usage from around 1.1 GiB to just around 50 MiB.

Wesnoth RCX now remembers the main window size and the preview background color each time. Additionally, it’s now possible to apply TC to a whole color palette in the Palette Editor dialog, using the new Recolor option.

Finally, a few minor interaction issues were fixed in this release, including the Add from List option (Palette Editor) being available and non-functional when no palettes are selected.

Feedback

Bugs and feature requests should preferably be posted to the issue tracker at Github so I don’t have a chance to forget about them.

Of course, as usual you can provide other kinds of feedback through the Wesnoth.org forum topic and this announcement post. It would be nice to hear from you if you use this software, regardless of whether you liked it or not — any feedback is appreciated here.

•••

Go test and create, and have lots of fun!

Wesnoth RCX 0.2.0

The new major feature release of Wesnoth RCX is now available for download!

Downloads

• Source code: wesnoth-rcx-0.2.0.tar.bz2 (Bzip2 tarball, 103.3 KiB)
  SHA1 checksum: 158f0f8e98aeb852e6265aa8cae83a3f01454f38
• Windows: wesnoth-rcx-0.2.0-win32.zip (Zip archive, 5.0 MiB)
  SHA1 checksum: 14d2fb244ff1f45968d9104b55013f43a95f451a
• Mac OS X: wesnoth-rcx-0.2.0.dmg (Application disk image, 17.4 MiB)
  SHA1 checksum: 2d8221a6002d37cc352cfa2a67938afd7b9596e3
  Provided by Alarantalara.
• Patch: qt-4.6-4.7-compatibility.patch (Source code patch, 6.5 KiB)
  SHA1 checksum: e9e800c98bdb79c234d536277bfb5d3ea9014a89
  You only need to apply this patch if you are building version 0.2.0 from source using Qt 4.6.x or 4.7.x. Run qmake -v in the console to see the Qt version in use.

The project page on this very site has been updated accordingly, and split from the main Wesnoth-TC page.

New in this version

One year and nearly eight months have passed since the last release, version 0.1.4. There was very little activity for most of the time until July this very year, although the primary release goals had already been long established.

The new built-in palette and color range editors allow creating and modifying these items for the game’s recoloring engine with ease, as well as generating WML definitions for your use in add-on production and testing. Various user interface improvements and additions, such as a Recent Files section and a Reload action, allow for a smoother workflow. The redesigned main window now supports scrolling large and zoomed-in images, as well as dragging any of the previews to other applications accepting graphic drops, such as the GIMP.

This version also sees the addition of menu options to change the preview background color, cleaner file output notifications, an enhanced Windows build process with embedded version and icon attributes, and a simple make install target for Linux/X11 users building from source. The included documentation has been improved in this release as well.

Known issues

Some of the known issues with this release are mentioned in the BUGS file included in the source code tarball; other issues have been fixed after the release, in the master branch in the public Git repository.

• The unmodified 0.2.0 source code distribution will not build using Qt 4.6 or 4.7 without the patch provided in the Downloads section above. This issue was—rather unfortunately—discovered after the release was tagged. The fix has been committed to Git already.
• Zooming in requires extremely large amounts of CPU time and memory, especially for images larger than 72x72 pixels at zoom levels greater than 200%. It’s advised that you avoid zooming in unless you have at least 2 GiB of RAM available.
• Zooming does not preserve the current viewport, indiscriminately recentering it instead.
• The preview background color choice is not persistent across re-runs. This has been solved in Git already.
• The dialog shown by the Add from List option in the Palette Editor may have the help text cut off depending on your display and font configuration
• Dragging previews is not always possible on Linux/X11, depending on the Qt 4 style engine in use. A workaround has been implemented for the Oxygen style (KDE workspace default), but other styles that allow dragging windows from empty areas may ‘steal’ Wesnoth RCX’s events.
• Dragging previews to Windows Paint does not currently work, presumably because the application expects to get access to a file on disk. Since Wesnoth RCX does not store the recolored image on disk until the user requests it, this problem might be impossible to fix.
• The Windows build might occasionally crash during the initial file open dialog, apparently whenever a directory takes too long to display. This does not seem to happen later during execution.
• The Windows build might display occasional minor glitches with mouse-over decorations on buttons and radio/checkboxes when running on Windows XP with styles supporting them (e.g the default Luna style).
• The Add from List button in the Palette Editor remains enabled at times when it cannot do anything useful (e.g. when there are no palettes to select and edit). This has been solved in Git already.

Feedback

With the move to Github came a few goodies; in particular, there is now an official tracker for bugs and feature requests for those who desire a better, supported alternative to the Wesnoth.org forum topic and these blog announcements.

As usual, you can also provide other kinds of feedback through those two aforementioned channels. It would be nice to hear from you if you use this software, regardless of whether you liked it or not — any feedback is appreciated here.

Finally

One problem in terms of development and testing is that I do not currently own a Mac machine, nor do I really intend to. This means I have to rely on certain assumptions and avoid doing anything too crazy that is not guaranteed to work on all platforms or—in particular—widget style engines. So far this appears to have worked fine, thanks to Qt’s cross-platform design.

The Windows (Win32) build has been tested much better in that regard, since my current development machine also functions as a decent VirtualBox VM host. I have gone to rather great lengths this time to improve the build by adding some embedded information to blend better with the environment, and including the Qt library in the wesnoth-rcx.exe executable itself, thus removing the need for two DLLs in the distribution.

Testing on Windows and Mac OS X feels really important to me, given my target audience; most artists seem to prefer these mostly hassle-free operating systems, and I fully respect that choice. My goal is to reach as many artists as possible with a useful and powerful tool that does not get in the way of the creative process, unlike the Wesnoth game proper, so it’s important to ensure a minimum quality level for each release that is consistent across the three main supported platforms.

I have done a lot of work coding and testing this release on Linux (Debian wheezy), Windows XP, and Windows 7, and I hope there aren’t any showstoppers left in this version. However, as you can see above, there is still quite a lot left to do in terms of polishing. Depending on feedback, a new 0.2.1 release might be published in the upcoming weeks. However, many of the remaining bugs require more meticulous inspection and extensive design changes; those will not happen until 0.3.0.

In the meantime, go test and create, and have lots of fun!

UPDATE 2012-08-15: the Mac OS X binary is up now.