Re: Considerations for 'xmms' removal from Debian
Lionel Elie Mamane <lionel <at> mamane.lu> writes:
>
> Would a mention of the "different direction of audacious" in the
> release notes of lenny, the next Debian release, fulfil your "PR
> handling" request? Something like
Simply not asserting that Audacious is a fullstop "XMMS clone" will fulfill my
request.
>
> 4.5 XMMS removal
>
> Due to concerns over its high number of bugs, unmaintained status
> (and hence bugs will not get fixed), usage of old, unmaintained
> libraries (gtk+ 1.2) and no UTF-8 support, xmms has been removed from
> Debian. We suggest users of xmms try 'bmpx' and/or 'audacious' for
> media players that may feel familiar to them. You may also want to
> give xmms2 a shot: it is by the same upstream than xmms, albeit feels
> very different.
>
The developers of bmpx no longer have a player that is anything like
Audacious or XMMS. It uses GStreamer and looks more like Amarok than
XMMS. You should look at their Screenshots[1] before recommending it
as an XMMS replacement.
I'm not qualified to comment on XMMS2.
Sure, audacious is similar to XMMS, and claiming that is fine. Claiming
that we are an XMMS *clone* sends the wrong message to your user base
and causes problems in upstream with bugreports like:
(a) Feature X is broken in Audacious because it's not like XMMS.
(b) You don't _____________________. That's a regression from XMMS.
(c) Why doesn't Audacious have _________? XMMS does.
As long as we don't hear about 'regressions from XMMS' as a result of
a migration path provided by Debian, then you have fulfilled my request.
This is where Gentoo initially failed to succeed in their migration.
William
[1] http://beep-media-player.org/site/Screenshots
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