New developer - initial issues noticed

• Jan 10, 2013 - 16:27

Hi, I am planning to make some contributions to MuseScore development, and have installed Fedora 17 under VirtualBox as a dedicated environment for it. I've also set up git successfully, obtained the code and done my first successful build. In the course of doing so, I came across a few issues that I wanted to mention. Being new to MuseScore development, I don't know whether these are already known about or should be raised as bug reports in some way. Advice and guidance would be appreciated. Some of the items are to do with documentation and some with operation.

1. The page [[nodetitle:Compile instructions (Fedora 16) - Git]] refers to FC16, but the current version of Fedora as 17. It seems to build MuseScore fine (once the next point is addressed...).

2. The list of dependencies on that page doesn't mention Lame. The first time I tried to compile, it failed due to a missing lame.h. I needed to go to RPM Fusion and install lame and lame-devel

3. After compiling, the README file says (in the section Test:) to do:

cd build/mscore
mscore

In fact I found I needed to cd to build.release/mscore instead. And then of course use ./mscore instead of plain mscore.

4. On starting up, I get the message:
QGtkStyle was unable to detect the current GTK+ theme
I don't know whether that matters or not.

5. On exit I also noticed the error:
Unable to open file "/home/ws/sfont/FluidR32.SF2"
I don't know at what point this was displayed, as I only saw it after exiting revealed the terminal window again. I guess that the hard-coded path should in fact be dynamically computed.

6. When creating a new score using the Jazz Lead Sheet template, the Title and Subtitle are centred about the left edge of the title box instead of being in the middle. Composer was also in the wrong place outside the left edge of the title box. Lyricist appeared to be in the right place, but it failed to use the Jazz font!

Creating a new score without a template puts them all in the correct places.

7. Trying to use the (non-jazz) Lead Sheet template gives an error that it is in a pre-0.9.5 format and needs to be converted using MuseScore 1.x first.

I'm looking forward to contributing a couple of ideas that I have, but will post about them separately after I have studied the code a bit.

Cheers
Tony

Comments

• Jan 10, 2013 - 17:24

ad 2: the page mentioned in 1) does point to the Ubuntu instructions and these do mention lame.
ad 3: good candidate for your first pull request ;-)
ad 5: good candidate for your first real fix...
ad 6: I believe Marc Sabatella is working on this

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• Jan 10, 2013 - 19:46

I only just a couple of days ago became aware titles were not aligning displaying properly. And I wasn't aware it was only (?) in the jazz templates (which I did indeed create) where this was happening. Unfortunately, I've had to reinstall windows from scratch last week and lost my build environment - not that I had done any actually programming yet anyhow. I'm happy to look into why the text is not coming out right in these templates, if someone more familiar with code can hazard a guess as to what the issue might be so I know where to start. I am assuming we eventually need to regenerate all templates to actually use the "new" text styling mechanism, as the old emplates would have text attributes hard coded. But I'd have thought that hard coding would still work. Maybe it's a temporary code bug?

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• Jan 18, 2013 - 23:37

Thanks for the welcome. As is typical, I've had hardly any time since my initial posting, but have been getting my head round git!

Regarding some of my points:

3. I'll make myself a topic branch for the README correction and submit a pull request as suggested. It will be a good exercise for the procedure.

5. By unzipping the .mscz files and examining the .mscx files extracted, I discovered that this message is due to an embedded Sound Font with an absolute path in the example demos/promenade.mscz:

<s name="soundfont" val="/home/ws/sfont/FluidR3.SF2"/>

Cheers
Tony

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