Re: Development status

I do not completely agree - amaroK really got a lot of very interesting 
features, but because of its bugs and the KDE integration many people 
dislike it.
The bugs cause annoying crashes and the KDE integration makes its 
startup slow because of the fat kdelib has to be preloaded before amaroK 
itself can start. So people using fluxbox or blackbox who like 
minimalistic systems which do not need a lot of resources will never use 
amaroK.
I am looking forward to XMMS2 a lot, because of I hope it will stay 
mostly minimalistic and will provide new features like displaying the 
covers of albums out of the box.
The current problem is that nobody writes a lot of completely new code 
for XMMS, there are a few plugins for displaying album covers but they 
are buggy or not ready for use.

For myself I would like to see XMMS development being brought back to 
life, maybe the developers could try to make it GTK2-compatible (BMP is 
a kind of GTK2-version of XMMS but I dislike it, because it has got a 
very different feeling to XMMS) and make the skins a lot more flexible 
by adding features like setting the position of buttons or even adding 
buttons in the skin system.
I was satisfied with XMMS from CVS for a while now, but because new 
patches seem to get in there _VERY_ slowly, I even thought about giving 
up using XMMS recently.

So has anyone an idea what may be done to make the XMMS development work 
again as it used to be some time ago?

Peter



Roy Schestowitz wrote:

> _____/ On Thu 03 Nov 2005 16:42:47 GMT, [Eric Fikus] wrote : \_____
>
>> So it's been some years since a new version of xmms was released, but
>> the xmms2 post on the home page insists that xmms is not dead.  There
>> is a nice page showing which features will be in the next release but
>> I think even that is more than a year old.
>>
>> Is there a todo list for getting out a new stable version?  Can
>> somebody impose a freeze and set a target date?
>>
>> I've always liked xmms and I'm not fond of any of the newer music
>> players.  For myself I'm happy to use cvs but I hate to see xmms
>> stagnate in this way.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Eric Fikus
>
>
> I must second that. XMMS is a rich application with attractive skins 
> and many
> valuable extensions. It is also very easy-to-use and stable (unlike the
> application I will refer to below).
>
> I have used XMMS for years, but recently I bought another machine 
> which happened
> to have AmaroK pre-installed. Ever since that day, I cannot help but 
> feel that
> XMMS leaves me behind. AmaroK uses extensions from XMMS, it is *not* 
> stable,
> but its management of playlist is astounding. Lyrics and album cover 
> are just
> few among its many astounding capabilities, so I hope XMMS development is
> brought back to life.
>
> I still use XMMS endlessly, but I have seen the neighbour's garden and 
> it is
> slowly getting greener. Since AmaroK is integrated with KDE, XMMS 
> might soon
> become the GNOMErs choice. Having said that, I don't know what 
> implication
> SuSE's recent move to GNOME will have.
>
> Roy
>