aRts maintenance

[Michael Donaghy]

On Thu, 2004-12-02 at 17:46 +0100, Stefan Gehn wrote:
> Moin,
> 
> Am Donnerstag, 2. Dezember 2004 16:10 schrieb Stefan Westerfeld:
> > If you looked closely at my latest aRts commits, you probably already saw
> > that I almost didn't work on it lately. I thought quite a bit about this -
> > as it is hard to definitely stop coding on a long term project - but I came
> > to the conclusion that I will no longer work on it. I think its better to
> > definitely draw the line here, so that a new maintainer can be found and/or
> > plans on how to proceed without aRts for KDE can be made and implemented.
> 
> With everbody saying that (at least) artsd is dead I really doubt anybody will 
> maintain it (all I hear about artsd is "bleh, crashy, blub" although it works 
> well enough here). Quite a loss IMHO, especially with all the little things I 
> squeezed out of it (like "the most stable shoutcast streaming plugin ever" 
> aka floodcast) and which I have to reimplement on another backend (whatever 
> that will be).

Yeah, that seems to be the way of things, but I'll miss it. It could
mean the death of noatun, which I would consider a shame since I did my
first proper bit of coding for it, but I suppose amarok (which is not
tied to arts) has overtaken it these days. Still, thanks for everything,
and I will miss arts.
> 
> > Part of this of course already started anyway, and I hope that KDE4,
> > whatever it will use for "the multimedia stuff" will provide an even better
> > user experience than KDE1, KDE2 and KDE3 did ;). I surely would enjoy using
> 
> AFAIK there will be a keep-it-simple-stupid approach that suffices KNotify and 
> smaller games. Every real sound-application will have to reinvent the wheel 
> and choose a new sound-backend (which will then force users to install a 
> dozen different sound systems/servers/whatever) :(

That sounds bad. I hoped we were going to integrate GStreamer now that
it's stable and have a common sound server for Linux desktops. (Yeah,
and then we'd agree a common widget toolkit and it would come with the
moon on a stick. But it's a nice thought).