Default Music Player in Ubuntu 12.04

[Oliver Grawert]

hi,
On Tue, 08 Nov 2011 15:15:38 +0800
Chow Loong Jin <hyperair at ubuntu.com> wrote:

>
> >  * 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?
> 
well, its been general issues with the mono stack in the past (way
before we shipped banshee at all) that made it hard to support mono
apps on arm. alongside this the ubuntu arm port is to my knowledge the
only arm distro port to date that focuses on armv7 only with all the
possible optimizations this arch offers (modulo hard float which we
will likely switch to with precise). 

every release since we switched away from the greatest common
denominator subarch (armv4t) that debian defaults to we had massive
issues with mono, starting with the fact that boehm GC is used by
default which makes all mono packages uninstallable in a qemu chrooted
environment (which many people use issue-free for all other desktop
packages for cross development). 

with the support for the cortex-a9 cpu line we got SMP support in the
arm land, banshee was the only mono app not working and it ate several
manweeks to nail it down to the below comment in the code (and indeed
the missing code bits):

  /* SMP on ARM is very similar to XCHG on x86.  Doesn't lock the
   * bus because there are no SMP ARM machines.  If/when there are,
   * this code will likely need to be updated. */

in the current release LP. bug #857299 caused banshee to hang hard after
drawing the UI on arm, this was nailed down to upstream bug #661112
(which is still in critical and NEW state despite there existing a
patch since a while), but sadly to late before release that we could do
much more about it but switch the arm images back to RB.

the ubuntu-arm team is 4 developers and one QA person caring for the
various images, the archive port, build failures, arm-server and more,
losing one or two persons for a week or two massively hurts us ... for
the last two releases exactly this was sadly the case though. if
upstream would be able to care more for arm (and especially for some
recent arm arches instead of nailing arm ports to something timely
equivalent to the 486DX/SX era) this would surely help a lot.

it is not that we dont like banshee in the arm team it is just that for
the cycles where we started shipping it (or had to review it for
possible shipment) it was the one app causing the most pain for us.

with the switch to hardfloat i would expect us to hit issues again in
precise so i was actually pleased to hear there was a discussion about
switching back to RB, even though i use banshee and personally like it
on my x86 laptop.

ciao
	oli
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