The MOC Report

In the run up to Christmas I thought I'd give you all a run down on how progress on MOC is running before you run away for the Christmas break.

As you'll be aware, MOC 2.5-beta1 was released in mid-October and has now been picked up by several distributions.

Several bugs have been reported. Their very existence implies that they weren't detected during pre-release testing and so it's not surprising that most cannot be reproduced locally and have to be debugged by e-mail, which is a time-consuming process.

With the new release, some new clues about old bugs have become available (particularly on screen upsets caused by the mishandling of non-ASCII characters). The major ones are now solved but the remaining ones will have to wait for the next release.

New development work has highlighted additional problem areas and these too are being worked on. Audio files exceeding 2GiB in size or having a similarly large number of samples are proving an especially fertile bug hunting ground.

Once these issues have been resolved MOC 2.5-beta2 will be released, but the progress towards it is slower than I would have hoped.

MOC's small band of developers and pre-commit testers has also grown a little with the addition of Tomasz Golinski, who has been a long-time contributor, undertaking to maintain the MOC web site content and information about MOC found on external web sites. He has in mind to make some rearrangements, so look for some web site changes in the near future. It will be good to have the web site tracking MOC developments more closely.

I'm hoping that in the coming month we will gain the services a MOC user who has volunteered to act as MOC Contributions Coordinator if and when his studies permit. This will be of significant benefit to the MOC user community as he will be able to harvest the contributions currently scattered throughout the Forum and place those still relevant in one common location where they can be kept current. Through him I am also hoping to provide pre-commit patchsets so users who wish to explore unreleased functionality will be able to do so.

Thank you to all those who have contributed to MOC in the past whether through bug reports, the discussion of ideas, testing or actual code, and I hope you will continue to do so in the future. Your support is very much appreciated.

Finally, let me wish all MOC users a very relaxing holiday season to the accompaniment of your favourite music.

John Fitzgerald.
MOC Maintainer.