Fwd: Removing amarok

[Matt Ruffalo]

On 2017-09-13 00:37, Simon Quigley wrote:
> Hey Aaron,
>
> On 09/12/2017 03:54 PM, Aaron Honeycutt wrote:
>> We already replaced it in AA. If your talking about removing fr archive
>> all together that would be Ubuntu Developer no?
> I'm asking feedback from the people who have maintained it since it was
> introduced into the archive before asking for removal...
>

Hi all-

I emailed Aaron about this privately, since I wasn't sure whether a
"user" question/request was appropriate for a developer mailing list,
and he suggested that I should send this to the mailing list also.

As a long-time Kubuntu user, I was very surprised to see a kubuntu-devel
mailing list posting about the removal of Amarok -- I had no idea that
the package has "plenty of bugs, no active upstream (aka dead upstream)
and no finished port to Qt5".

I saw Aaron's note of "We already replaced it in AA" and was curious
about this replacement -- I've been regularly doing some very light
testing with the daily ISO images of Kubuntu 17.10 and I didn't realize
that Amarok was no longer included. (I would be using 17.10 full-time on
my laptop if not for what I mentioned in
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2017-August/039961.html,
and "Amarok is missing" is one of the things that I definitely wouldn't
notice with some light VM testing, so I suppose this is also some
additional evidence of what I mentioned in that previous email.)

I'm quite interested to see what the replacement of Amarok is intended
to be. I just booted an up-to-date daily ISO of Kubuntu 17.10 and the
only music player I see is Canata, and after starting that up and
playing with it a bit, it seems like it's missing a great deal of
functionality compared to Amarok. My first impression is that it only
seems to support a single directory in which all music files are stored,
as opposed to Amarok's selection of multiple music folders. It also
seems to not handle music on a read-only NFS mount, as I have done with
Amarok since v1.4 on KDE 3 -- either that, or Canata is taking a very
long time to index my collection, with no progress feedback whatsoever.
This would make Canata effectively unusable for me, as I've been keeping
all of my media on a file server with read-only shares for more than 15
years, and I think this is a valid use case which should be supported by
the standard music player in Kubuntu. (I also keep a few random things
in ~/Music as well as the aforementioned NFS share, so I've really
become used to having a music library that spans multiple folders.)

Additionally, the setup wizard for Canata (the existence of which is
already a large red flag in terms of usability for a default music
player) contains many "gotchas" in the form of "NOTE:" and "Warning:"
messages in this setup wizard, which wouldn't be very friendly to a less
experienced user. I am rather familiar with Linux system administration,
and I understand Canata's warning of "you're not in the 'users' group,
Canata will function better if you are", and someone who is less
technical will likely not take this as well, like "I just want to play
my music files, why is this default music player warning me about so
much, and telling me that my computer is misconfigured after a clean
install of the OS? Why do I need to care what this 'MPD' thing is?
Aren't I playing music through Canata?"

Can a more usable music player be included with Kubuntu 17.10? I'm not
at all familiar with the maintenance burden of keeping Amarok around,
but would it be possible for its corpse to be kept on life support for a
bit longer until a good alternative is available? (Aaron mentioned to me
that "the one I would like in would be Babe-Qt but it's not packaged for
Ubuntu yet so can only do so much at that point", and I'm not familiar
with Babe-Qt, but it seems like anything will be better than Canata.)

Thank you for your time,
MMR...



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