Default Music Player in Ubuntu 12.04

[Sebastien Bacher]

Le 21/11/2011 11:19, Iain Lane a écrit :
>
> Sorry, but it doesn't seem 'clear' to me. Please explain more.
>
> More constructive would have been sound technicals argument that could
> have been presented to upstream. Things they would have been able to
> work on.
>
> What is 'clear' though is that the default application selection process
> should not work like this. I would like to see us learn lessons from
> this situation so that our upstreams and users are treated with greater
> respect.
Hi Iain,

Thanks for staying constructive in those discussions, I think there is 
an agreement than topic has been handled in a pretty suboptimal way and 
lessons have been learnt, next time we will for sure do a call for 
topics before UDS, lock the list before the session and make sure to 
discuss what issues we are having and how we can solve them rather than 
trying to kick out things.

> Most importantly, we need to be having more constant and constructive
> dialogs with upstreams throughout the whole cycle and not just at
> application selection time (actually in this case there has been very
> poor communcation with upstream even since the discussion).
Right, that requires somebody from the distribution is feeling "in 
charge of the software" and is representing the distribution view 
though. I don't want to dismiss anyone from the desktop group but nobody 
looking at GNOME or Unity has been watching on the media players this 
cycle, the work has been mainly done by you and some of the other Debian 
pkg-mono people, I'm not sure how the group is feeling like an active 
part of Ubuntu and representing the opinions and issues there, or how 
much the group is focussing on Debian and considering their derivates as 
well?

I don't mean to offence anyone there, but the question is to know if 
somebody is feeling like in charge of banshee in Ubuntu and representing 
Ubuntu views, or if the people maintaining it are cross Debian,Ubuntu 
groups with a focus on Debian (in which case we might need somebody on 
the Ubuntu side as we do for i.e GNOME)?

>   Using the
> promise of being on or threat of being removed from the install to
> cudgel projects into the direction you want is not very satisfactory.
That's not really what happened, if that was the case we would have come 
with a list of "you should be looking at those if you want to stay on 
the CD". While it would make sense to tell upstream what we like or 
dislike about their software, I'm not sure we should try to "use" our 
position to demand things to be done or fixed for us. I would feel 
uncomfortable telling any upstream "you should fix those bugs or your 
software will be out of the CD", while in practice it's true that some 
issues lead us to decide what to ship or not.
>
> Chopping-and-changing doesn't do people any favours either. There should
> be some commitment from Ubuntu; being the default app brings upstreams a
> lot of users (which is great), but also increases the support and bug
> workload (which is not so great).  If Ubuntu could be relied on more
> then upstreams would not be so burdened.
>
> PiTiVi was treated in a similar way a few months ago. It is sad that no
> lessons were learned from that situation. Please do not let it happen
> again. None of this should have come out of a UDS session. If there are
> such serious issues then they should have been raised months ago.
>
>
>
The pitivi situation is similar, while we could have made a better job 
at keeping upstream people in the discussion and decision I don't think 
that what we need is "upstream lobbying for their software" during the 
discussions, we rather want people who are not part of those project 
enough to have a if-possible unbiased view on the pro and con of the 
situations. Once we have this summary we could let upstream know the 
trend, i.e "we are unhappy with your software because of those reasons: 
... and if it keeps this way we might look at replacing it in the next 
cycles". I will come back in reply to some of the others emails about 
the issues with music players specific case.

--
Sebastien Bacher