Background to the Rosegarden-4 project

From a developer's perspective, the Rosegarden-2.1 code reached the end of its useful life about five years ago.

Its internal representation had become inadequate for the things we were wanting to do, and it was becoming too difficult to extend it without introducing some serious stability issues. The GUI was looking rather antiquated, and it was too closely coupled with the rest of the application to be straightforward to replace. We wanted closer communication between the notation-editing and sequencing parts of the application and the existing code just wasn't designed that way.

Previous attempts

Over the years, we've made several attempts to rewrite Rosegarden. Here are some of them:

• Late 1995: Completely abortive attempt by Chris to port the GUI to Motif.
• 1995-1996: Andy makes a sibling version of Rosegarden for Microsoft Windows, adding a significant amount of extra sequencer functionality. Then he loses the only copy of the source code in a hard disc crash. You can still have the 32-bit binaries if you like, but they might not work. Don't come crying to us if you blow up your computer.
• Early 1996: Inspired by Guillaume's strange fascination with Tcl/Tk, we give serious consideration to rewriting the GUI using Tk. Rather fortunately, we don't actually get as far as writing any code.
• Early 1998: Following a brief dalliance with Objective C, we begin a ground-up rewrite of the notation editor in C++ using the GTK-- toolkit. It reaches the stage of being able to load a Rosegarden 2.1 file (using a new parser written with the PCCTS system) and bring up a few empty windows. Some amount of core container code written by Chris, and some GUI code by Guillaume. Abandoned when we decided the basic architecture was still going to be inadequate for the amount of editor-sequencer integration we'd like to be able to do. Here's the source code as it was when we abandoned it: 5,600 lines of C++ that's probably nearly impossible to compile by now.
• June 1998: A session in the pub with Bownie and Chris leads to the start of "Rosegarden 3.0", a Grand Unified Rewrite. We aimed to produce a system where the music was stored in a separate, server datastore and made available to a set of editing and performance clients via CORBA objects, implemented once again in C++ using GTK--, with MICO as the CORBA ORB to begin with. This design had a lot of potential: if we'd been three talented programmers working on it full-time, we could have produced a very nice modular, extensible, rather slow system. In practice, however, we spent a lot of time talking about it, then Chris spent a month writing a working datastore implementation then went on holiday for six months, during which time nobody else managed to get to grips with the rather complicated code. And when Chris got back, he found he'd also forgotten how it worked. We end up deciding to drop CORBA and do something simpler instead. You can pick up the last source code for this version if you like -- it's about 12,000 lines of C++ and IDL that's a beastly pain to compile and does nothing worth looking at. It's very clever though.
• April 2000: Following his departure from the GTK-- development team and disillusionment with the GNOME project, Guillaume begins building a Rosegarden GUI using Qt for KDE. By working on the GUI first, with relatively little structure underneath (except a set of generic event objects developed by Chris), he at last manages to get something visible out of it. Project development moves to SourceForge, like all other God-fearing free-software projects. Progress is still slow, partly because Chris and Bownie are far too busy at work to help out much.
• June 2000: Fifth anniversary of the release of Rosegarden 1.0. The oldest Rosegarden code (the help system, strangely enough) is now over seven years old. It's more than two and a half years since Rosegarden 2.1 came out.
• April 2001: After Chris and Bownie manage to find a bit more spare time and join Guillaume in actually putting in some real work, progress speeds up somewhat. We decide on a firm set of basic features required for a public 0.1 developer release.

And that's where we are at the moment. Our mantra is now:

"If we lose focus again, Rosegarden is dead. It has already been brought back from limbo a couple of times, there won't be a next one."

At the time of writing, we've made the 0.1 release (in October) plus a couple more, have passed 3,500 CVS commits and have written vastly more lines of code than we managed in any of the previous rewrites. Things are looking modestly positive.