I've been working on the libmegapixels library for quite a bit now. The base of the library is pretty solid which is configuring a V4L2 pipeline so you can get camera frames on modern ARM platforms. Most of the work on the library side is figuring the AWB/AE/AF code and how that will fit together with applications.
Due to the AAA code not working yet and the API not being being fully defined on how those parts will fit together I've been holding of on tagging an actual release on the libmegapixels library.
A lot of my projects, especially libraries, are written in Python so I've long enjoyed the luxury of APIs being duck-typed and having the possibility of adding optional arguments to methods in the future. Sadly in C libraries I can't get away with never defining the types for arguments that might change in the future or adding optional arguments.
My original plan was to tag a release on libmegapixels together with the first 2.x release of Megapixels since these pieces of software are intended to fit together but after thinking about it some more (and some convincing from other people interested in the libmegapixels release) I've decided to tag a 0.1 release.
In an ideal world I can just release code when it's fully done and tested. In this case the long time it takes to get everything ready for use will mean that potential contributors to the code will also be held back from experimenting with the codebase. Especially since a large part of libmegapixels is the config files it ships for specific hardware configurations. If I wouldn't make any releases then at some point users/developers will be forced to just ship random git commits which is a way worse situation to be in for bug tracking.
With this 0.1 release I want to make it possible to start writing config files for various phones and platforms to test camera pipelines. Hopefully this will also mean any issues with the configuration file format that people might hit will be figured out before I have to tag a "final" 1.x release.
The release
So the initial tagged release of libmegapixels:
- located at https://gitlab.com/megapixels-org/libmegapixels/-/tags/0.1.0
- Build instructions at https://libme.gapixels.me/building.html
- Comes with absolutely no guarantee of stability for the C api of the library
- Most likely the config file format is stable but might have small tweaks before the 1.x release
Hopefully this will allow people to start experimenting with the codebase and generate some feedback on it so I'm not just developing this for months and completely overfitting it to the three devices I'm testing on.
I'm planning to make a similar release for libdng soon. That library is also mostly stable but I need to fix up the last parts of the API to allow reading and writing all the required metadata.