aRts maintenance

[mETz]

On Donnerstag Dezember 2 2004 23:13, Michael Donaghy wrote:
> 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

So why don't you go on with coding? :)

> tied to arts) has overtaken it these days. Still, thanks for everything,
> and I will miss arts.

1. I'm in the process of making the player backend a plugin in Noatun, I 
certainly won't let it die just because artsd has become outdated
2. I don't like how Amarok and JuK work (I don't need/want a music-library, I 
have a filesystem), this only strengthens 1.

> > > 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,

No, as I said, KDE will only have a simple backend for playing sounds through 
various things (GStreamer being only one of them). Everything more 
sophisticated will have to either choose a backend or make the audio-backend  
pluggable (as Amarok, JuK and soon Noatun do/will do).
I for myself don't like this choice thing too much because all it does is 
making the apps more complex (needs another abstraction layer) and the users 
even more confused ("now do I have to install gstreamer or xine or mplayer or 
what???").

Btw, does GStreamer work on anything else except Linux?

Bye, Stefan aka mETz
-- 
ICQ#51123152 | Moege der Pinguin mit euch sein