Some impressions from aKademy

[Jeff Mitchell]

Quoting Mark Kretschmann <markey at web.de>:

> Yes, I agree with your position. Starting to port now and then not having an
> Amarok release for a full year wouldn't be good. We would lose direction and
> our users (who are used to our rapid release cycle) would become impatient.

Agreed.

> If we are to make a 1.5 release, we could also start to remove all X11
> dependencies, in order to make the final move to KDE4 easier.

Good idea.  If we start this now, porting to Windows (and Mac) will be  
faster later, which considering how late KDE4 is shaping up to be will  
likely be important.

> I agree stability is absolutely crucial. But I have yet to see evidence for
> instabilities with our latest releases. We monitor user feedback constantly,
> through bug reports, IRC, and forums, and I have not seen any alarming
> reports lately. What gives?
>
> (And yes, I realize you've probably been talking to Dirk ;)

Personally 1.4.3 and current SVN are about the most stable I've ever  
seen Amarok, but I do still see crashes from time to time.  Most of  
these however seem to be from the engines, or possibly the  
engine-handling code.

If we want to have any sort of a serious Windows presence one day, one  
thing I will say about Windows media players is that they're generally  
stable.  Featureless, ugly, confusing, etc...but they don't seem to  
crash nearly as much as we do, even with our recent stability streak.

By the way, props to Martin.  I'm fairly convinced that much of our  
recent stability is due to him going through threaded code and  
cleaning it up, adding mutexes and such.  I think it'd be good for  
someone else to follow suit, to have another eye on anything that's  
done in a thread.  I'll be happy to do this, once I finish up a couple  
other things.

> Interesting. But is Kexi well maintained, and is it relatively   
> guaranteed that
> this stays so? What if Kexi development comes to a halt after we have
> switched? I'm cautious about introducing any new KDE dependencies.

I like the idea, and Kexi is a part of KOffice, which suggests it'll  
be maintained.  However, some distributinos may package up koffice in  
one monolithic package that users won't want to install.  And those  
that package it up into separate packages may not bother with Kexi if  
it doesn't have a large user base.

--Jeff