Default Music Player in Ubuntu 12.04

[Sebastien Bacher]

Le 21/11/2011 11:58, Christopher James Halse Rogers a écrit :
> It would be reasonable to say something like “shifting to GTK# 3 for
> the LTS release is too drastic a change, and we won't ship with GTK#
> 2”, but I don't think - at least without additional rationale - that
> the reasoning for Rhythmbox is obvious from this thread.
Hey,

Thanks for doing that summary, my view based the discussions we had:

- stability in Oneiric has been an issue, it might be due to gconf, u1 
or whatever but that's not excuse for shipping something buggy in 
Ubuntu, I'm not blaming anyone there but as a team we need to figure a 
way to make sure that the default music player is working. Doing finger 
pointing to other components to justify the issues is not good enough. I 
would be interested to see proposal on how we solve those stability 
issues and figure where we stand at any time regarding those.

- startup speed: that as been mentioned often, while being suboptimal 
that's not a blocker

- support for armel: nobody mentioned it during the session, it would be 
better if issues there would be solved but that doesn't seem to be a blocker

Other subjects that have been taking in consideration during that 
discussion:

- CD space (we don't especially need it but we tend to be short on it 
and any CD space win is a welcome)

- having to maintain mono in the LTS: while in practice the LTS support 
is mainly security fixes and important bug fixes and mono is probably 
not requiring a lot, what does that mean exactly? If we stop shipping 
mono on the CD can we lower our commitments to it? One issue raised 
there is the low number of software on Ubuntu written with that stack 
and the outdated binding, it doesn't feel like the stack is being pushed 
forward by anyone on the desktop at least.

- the gtk2->gtk3 transition, while it seems the new version is mostly 
reading in git the gtk3 mono bindings have not landed in the 
distribution yet nor got real world testing:
  - do we trust them to land in the lts cycle, be tested and show as 
being reasonably bug free
  - do we trust the banshee gtk2->gtk3 transition to be ready and having 
the quality needed by a lts
  - if we don't want to maintain 2 stack of mono gtk bindings, do we 
think tomboy will be ported to gtk3 this cycle? would it be an option to 
keep banshee 2.2? (it would keep webkit-gtk2 on the CD which has been 
pointed as an issue)

The gtk2 to gtk3 transition issue and the "what does it mean to maintain 
mono in the LTS" question seems to be the most important ones there, 
they are not especially things uptream has an answer to or control on, 
but that's thing we should have an opinion on as a distribution.

While we are speaking about quality I think it would also be good if the 
qa team (hey pedro as well ;-) could review the Oneiric feedback from 
banshee and rhythmbox and tell us what they think the trend on the bug 
reports is.

--
Sebastien Bacher