Amarok - hunting for a boost

[Pedro de Carvalho Gomes]

Welcome Tuomas. Thanks for you you energy to give a new boost to Amarok.

Here are some  thoughts, as I spent quite some time trying to make the 
first QT5 port:
- the hardest thing to port from QT4 to QT5 were the plugins, as they 
were based on QTScript. I even tried to recreate it the script engine at 
QT5. But it's too much work. Not to mention that there might be security 
concerns. Maybe we should accept it, and completely drop the old 
scripting engine. And, if there's enough interest, think of a new one, 
based on QML
- a port from QT5 to QT6 doesn't seem very traumatic as it was from QT4 
to QT5. I believe this should have high priority
- as far I last saw, MariaDB-embeded was to reach end-of-life this year. 
Alternatives should be discussed immediately

Best,

Pedro

On 2024-03-23 14:16, Tuomas Nurmi wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> after last weekend's email, I've received encouragement, wise words and
> various other forms of support from multiple people (Thank you!). I applied
> for the developer access, which was granted, which is great.
>
> I've updated the changelog today ( https://invent.kde.org/multimedia/amarok/-/
> blob/master/ChangeLog ) to include some information on the changes since 2.9
> (released in 2018).
>
> In the following days/weeks, I plan to triage a number of Amarok bugs on
> bugs.kde.org, and try and see if a 2.9.76 (alpha2) release can be organized in
> April. If this succeeds, goal could be a beta or two and then hopefully the
> long-awaited 3.0, maybe in Summer.
>
> The focus on the road up to 3.0 should probably be on fixing bugs and trying to
> ensure that everything keeps working with recent versions of required
> libraries. There probably shouldn't be introduction of completely new strings
> or features before 3.0 (Restoring some more functionalities lost during the
> KF5 porting might be feasible. However, all my favourite functionalities are
> there already, but I'll keep my eyes open in case something important comes
> up).
>
> After a KF5 based version is released, one can assess how much effort will a
> Qt6/KF6 version require (fortunately, a notable amount of work to remove usage
> of deprecated methods has been done during the last years, so it might not be
> totally overwhelming)
>
> Wishing you a nice Saturday, again!
> Cheers
> Tuomas
>
>
> Tuomas Nurmi kirjoitti lauantaina 16. maaliskuuta 2024 13.00.38 EET:
>> Hi everyone,
>> according to statistics, I used Amarok to listen to a total of 111 days of
>> music last year. That's why I thought I'd try gathering some attention and
>> stirring up some discussion to get a little boost for its development
>> progress.
>>
>> The current version 2.9.71, "3.0 Alpha" was released in February 2021.
>> However, there has been a notable amount of development going on since, the
>> current git state including additionally e.g. some functionality lost
>> initially between KDE4 and KF5 port replaced, fixes for crashes, support for
>> newer ffmpeg versions and so on. There's also (popular?) demand for a new
>> version, visible on e.g. the issue
>> https://invent.kde.org/multimedia/amarok/-/ issues/4
>>
>> The fact that there hasn't been a new version tagged since also causes some
>> problems and disinformation to arise, with distributions packaging git at
>> various dates and existence of bugs depending on the git checkout date and
>> not the actual version number (see e.g. https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?
>> id=481384 and https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=444408 )
>>
>> Merge requests receive quite limited attention, and take a long time to get
>> merged. E.g. my MR!53 https://invent.kde.org/multimedia/amarok/-/
>> merge_requests/53 has been waiting in its current state since May 2023.
>> The MR freshens up the codebase a bit (without altering functionality yet)
>> and has received a considerable amount of testing (last year, 111 days of
>> playing music by me; also other people have chimed in in the MR
>> conversations). (Another merge request that does some similar work on e.g.
>> OSD related functionality is pending at
>> https://invent.kde.org/multimedia/amarok/-/ merge_requests/55 - it disables
>> some things on Wayland, where the
>> corresponding functionality cannot be implemented with KF5 libraries, I
>> believe; I've been planning to give the remaining comments some more
>> attention after the !53 is merged) There's also a recent simple crash fix
>> MR!59 by me pending at
>> https://invent.kde.org/multimedia/amarok/-/merge_requests/59
>>
>> I also want to mention the recent nice work by Mihkel Tõnnov, whose MR!57
>> https://invent.kde.org/multimedia/amarok/-/merge_requests/57 fixes build
>> with recently released TagLib 2 and MR!60
>> https://invent.kde.org/multimedia/ amarok/-/merge_requests/60 which ports
>> things away from deprecated kcoreaddons_desktop_to_json.
>>
>>
>> I tried applying for a KDE developer access back in late 2020, but didn't
>> get it back then; I didn't refer to any supporter then though. I guess I
>> could try again sometime if needed.
>>
>> In addition to code, I've had a look at the bugs at bugs.kde.org. There are
>> 643 open bugs at the moment. However, with a quick assessment, I figure
>> somewhere between 200-400 could be easily closed as they're discussing a
>> functionality removed since, or have otherwise become outdated. Having a new
>> released version would naturally be nice here, too, but I've been planning
>> to triage some of the most obviously outdated ones sometime soon.
>>
>>
>> ------
>>
>> So, to summarize, I'd say
>> - Amarok is a very nice music player and (has been one for more than two
>> full decades)
>>
>> - It would benefit from more hands testing and reviewing the pending pull
>> requests on invent.kde.org (no special requirements, aside from the skills
>> to build Amarok from git - shout out to everyone who has been doing it -
>> you rock!)
>>
>> - It would be awesome to get some of the pending pull requests merged (KDE
>> developer access required)
>>
>> - People want a 3.0
>>    - but tagging and releasing of a 2.9.72 version would already go a long
>> way, would be awesome and would help with backlog and history [or 2.9.76,
>> as some distributions have been using 2.9.75 as version number for git
>> builds] (KDE developer access and some confidence and extra understanding
>> of related processes required).
>>
>> - I'm planning to do a spring cleanup on bugs.kde.org sometime soon
>>
>> - If someone wants to sponsor my application for a developer account, should
>> I file one, give me a holler (probably should be a well-known Amarok or KDE
>> contributor, or a famous rock star or something similar)
>>
>>
>> I'm here on mailing list, on #amarok at libera.chat and monitoring https://
>> invent.kde.org/multimedia/amarok (please do inform me if I'm missing some
>> relevant forum), open to discussion and eager to keep on contributing.
>> I'm happy to hear any comments (and should I get none, I guess I could use
>> that on dev access application, too, to demonstrate that there actually is
>> nobody around to sponsor it, which is also OK)
>>
>> Wishing a nice Saturday to those who celebrate!
>> Cheers
>> Tuomas Nurmi
>> (First appearing on Amarok Changelog at notes for 1.4.4, released Nov 2006)
>>
>> Now playing - Amarok: Status Quo - The Party Ain't Over Yet
>
>
>