Default Music Player in Ubuntu 12.04

[Chow Loong Jin]

On 08/11/2011 14:21, Martin Pitt wrote:
> [...]
> The problem that was raised is that the package doesn't get well
> maintained in Ubuntu (but is maintained well upstream). It did get
> quite a lot of uploads in oneiric, though.

I'd like to hear more about this, actually. It would be nice to know where I've
been slacking off so I can at least figure out areas to improve on.

> I tried banshee when we introduced it and during oneiric again, and
> both times it was very unstable and rather slow, and did not get my
> collection imported without crashing. Henceforth I noticed that wiping
> my configuration improved the stability quite a bit, that might
> explain why it's working better for others.

It would be nice if you backed up your configuration before wiping it, and filed
a bug with logs each time it crashed. In my previous email I mentioned that
majority of the bugs were caused by a broken gconfd (which may explain why
wiping your configuration helped matters), broken Mono.Zeroconf, and issues with
the UbuntuOne Music Store in the absence of an internet connection, most of
which should have been fixed in my 2.2.1-1ubuntu1 upload I did earlier today.

> My main reasons why I like to switch back to TB are:
> 
>  * Spending ~ 30 MB of CD space for a music player seems rather
>    excessive (if you count in the Mono stack)
> 
>  * There is no sign of GTK3 support yet, which keeps the old GTK2 and
>    much more importantly webkit-gtk2 on the CD (which alone is 8 MB).

You might like to see http://git.gnome.org/browse/banshee/log/?h=gtk3. With only
one remaining outstanding bug in Gtk# standing in the way of that branch being
merged into master, I don't see precise not having Banshee with full Gtk3 support.

>  * Our ARM team says that the current versions still work rather
>    poorly on ARM.

I saw one bug about that, also mentioned in my previous post, which is being
worked on, but that's about it. What other issues are there?

>  * We have shipped Rhythmbox in many previous releases, so while
>    constantly switching back and forth is certainly bad, LTS->LTS
>    upgraders will at least have consistency, and other upgraders won't
>    lose Banshee either.

Doesn't sound like a plus point to me, although it does lessen the impact of
switching back and forth. Does Rhythmbox have a migration path back from
Banshee, though?

>  * With the recent layoffs, Mono's future remains a bit fuzzy. I heard
>    the developers founded a new company, so it's certainly not going
>    away soon.

Xamarin's handling Mono development now, and it looks pretty active[1]. It was
fuzzy, but I don't think it is any more.

[1] https://github.com/mono/mono/commits/master

-- 
Kind regards,
Loong Jin

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