Re: Considerations for 'xmms' removal from Debian
José Miguel Parrella Romero <joseparrella <at> gmail.com> writes:
>
> The maintainers of the xmms package in Debian are proposing the removal
> of the aforementioned package. Please read on.
>
> 1. Rationale
>
> * Upstream has deprecated development and support for the current
> version of XMMS.
> * Several parts of the application are broken and no longer of Debian
> quality.
>
> 2. Current status
>
> * The BTS reports 231 bugs, most tagged 'important' or 'normal', and a
> couple of debugging was attempted with little success.
> * XMMS is broken in several aspects, one of the most important being
> it's dependence on GTK+ 1.2 and no UTF-8 support, which is standard in
> Debian Etch.
> * Other distributions have already discussed XMMS removal. Gentoo
> hardmasked the package based on the same rationale [1]
Yes, and Gentoo's user committee fucked over the entire image and public view of
Audacious' direction. Gentoo's (mis)handling of PR during this transitional time
has resulted in a lot of negativity towards audacious and several lame attempts
to find security holes in Audacious with the explicit purpose of trying to get
XMMS back.
I strongly suggest this doesn't happen in Debian, as upstream may not like the
result otherwise. The general consensus of our team is that we're not going
through this nightmare again.
> * 'bmpx' and 'audacious' are in Debian, ranks 8048 and 3649 in popcon.
> Both are very good and development-active substitutes to xmms.
At present, the only completely successful mainstream xmms->audacious to date
has been in Slackware, but that's because Pat didn't lie to the users about our
goals and project direction. Please respect our project and make sure it happens
this way in Debian if you provide an xmms->audacious upgrade path.
> * There's also in Debian the upstream-supported xmms2 package, 2598 in
> popcon rank.
>
> 2.1 Reverse depends
>
> The following packages depend on XMMS:
<snip>
> Most of this packages are xmms plugins. Maintainers will need to port
> them to xmms2 or bmpx, or they should be removed.
>
A large majority of these plugins have been ported to Audacious already.
> Other packages just depend on xmms as a mere multimedia player, and
> therefore we recommend the maintainers to adjust their dependencies to
> bmpx, xmms2 or audacious.
>
That's fine as long as you respect our requests with regards to handling the PR
of this.
> 2.2 Popcon
>
> xmms is now 1069 in the overall popcon rank, with 11029 installations,
> not counting the plugin users.
>
> Yours,
> the XMMS maintainers
>
> [1] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/desktop/sound/xmms.xml
>
>
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