[Icecast-dev] Icecast 2.4 - the road ahead

[Rücker Thomas]

Hi everyone,

While this email also contains mostly my personal thoughts its
main point is to open the discussion and invite contributions.

So, yesterday 2.3.3 finally happened. It took too long, a substantial 
part of the blame is on me. But we wanted to make sure that some fixes 
get done right and then I got caught up at work for months and suddenly 
lacked the time to complete the work. Anyway, we got it done and it 
looks good. The only thing missing is the Win32 build. - If someone has 
a VS6 installation and lots of spare time, help gladly accepted.

To look into the future though. There are very interesting and exciting 
developments already waiting to hit the development tree.
I know of patches:
- adding support for ogg/opus
- adding support for WebM (and thus to an extent Matroska)
I'm hoping to see them on this mailing list soon for discussion.

There's also plenty of items in the issue tracker waiting for volunteers 
to get their hands on.

The documentation could use some improvements too. Some functionality 
needs documentation (e.g. HTTPS support, STATS client) while in other 
places it can be improved (any takers for drawing a simple state chart 
explaining fallbacks?).

We hang out on freenode IRC in #icecast - feel free to join!

While I'm certainly not going to enforce it hard - I'd like to see the 
main and large changes go in soon, so that they can mature. Then we can 
focus on fixing existing and newly introduced bugs before we cut the 
release. When that will happen? I don't have a date, but for sure it 
won't be 4 years like with the last release. Preferably in a couple of 
months at latest, as soon as things have stabilized.

The stage is yours, the tree is open, let's rock!


Thomas