aRts in trunk

[Scott Wheeler]

On Friday 29 July 2005 20:52, Charles Samuels wrote:

> Noatun has a make-it-snow branch that is intended to be part of trunk, it
> just hasn't been merged yet, because my build system is pretty
> broken right now (Debian undergoing abi changes...) and that I haven't
> been so willing to code lately, which sucks.

Yes, I've tracked the commits, but I haven't noticed any porting to Qt 4 yet.  
On the other hand I have seen code added for other backends.

> Yes, that's because it works.

Wait -- you changed arguments.  You said you needed it there because you 
wanted to be able to work on it, but then said you don't work on it because 
it doesn't need it.

183 open bug reports, most of which have no hope of ever being resolved tells 
a different story.

> Cleaning it now, and cleaning it up "in the next few months" is all the
> same thing.  If you don't want it, don't check it out, it doesn't hurt you
> at all.
>
> I'm aware of that, but it's not an option for a lot of my needs anyway,
> I've discussed that at length on this list.  You ignored my complaints
> anyway.

Matthias actually did note the concerns that you mentioned and has made an 
attempt to address them in the current API.  That's been mentioned here.  I'd 
look at the current state of things and see if that's still the case.

> > If by "you" you mean "pretty much everyone in the KDE community", then
> > yes, we mostly have.  Stefan has said he won't maintain it further. 
> > Matthias has quit using it completely.  aRts is dead.
>
> I'm still using it.  Since I am a member of the set "everyone", you just
> lied. You are so emotional about hating arts that you don't see how it
> doesn't change anything at all for you to keep it in there.

Come on Charles, this is being silly.  You can nitpick word choice all you 
want but my point was clear (and I would say the "pretty much" was an 
appropriate qualifier, not that it matters at all).

I don't see where I've been particularly emotional.  aRts is not maintained; 
it hasn't been maintained for years.  It needs to be maintained and nobody is 
willing to do that.  There are alternatives that are maintained.

> You misunderstand my goals.  Noatun will support arts in KDE4, because
> arts seems(1) to work better(2) than Akode (and according to Stefan Gehn,
> gstreamer as well--although I havn't used that plugin yet).  It will be
> plugin-based. I need a place to maintain it, but more importantly, I want
> it easy for me to use, and so it has to be in svn.  Of course it something
> comes along that's better, I'll use that, but for now, the future is
> unknown.

If you're actually volunteering to maintain aRts -- great.  I still don't 
expect that the KDE project will ship it with their releases in KDE 4, so 
presumably that'll also include doing releases of aRts independently.

And note that I haven't discussed removing it from svn -- it will stay there.  
I've discussed removing it from trunk, since I don't expect to see further 
development.

> (1) Yes, Allan, I didn't report them, sorry.  It's probably more "by
> design" than a bug though.  If you want to talk about it, we can do it
> later, currently I'm busy.
>
> (2) aRts has been FUDed heavily by KDE developers (more than anyone),
> which just sickens me.
> I've heard things about "high latency" which is totally bogus, that it's
> less stable isn't right either, on the basis that it's as stable as akode
> is, and at least in that case, it's out of process, so the user will
> hardly notice if it does crash. You're all so wanting to throw it out that
> you refuse to admit to even its most tiny advantages.  You don't even use
> it so you don't know how it is.

aRts is more mature than aKode as a standalone backend.  Depending on your 
setup, it often works better than GStreamer.  But in the cases where it has 
problems, which are many, there's nobody left that has any interest in fixing 
those and there hasn't been for a few years.  There's a future in the other 
systems; there's not in aRts.

At any rate -- trying to move towards some resolution.  What would you say of 
keeping aRts in trunk on the condition of you taking over maintainership of 
it?  And by that I don't mean just slapping your name on it -- I mean real 
maintainership.  Are you willing to do that?  Even though we won't release it 
as part of KDE 4, I don't see any reason to evict it from its present home in 
SVN, but I'd like to see you decide between, "It works, it doesn't need 
anything more" and "I want to work on it".  In the prior case I don't see any 
reason for it to be in trunk.

-Scott

-- 
There are 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and 
those who don't.