Should gnash go stable?

MrFloppy · n00b Joined: 24 Apr 2010 Posts: 1

I recently posted a stable request for gnash to Gentoo bugzilla. It seems like the opinion is divided. So I would like to discuss it in here.

The pros of gnash:

faster than adobe-flash (at least here on my machines, x86 and amd64)
more secure because open source and assumingly faster bugfixes (adobe-flash is known to be one of the most unsecure software in our days)

The cons of gnash:

not feature complete (actual something between swf v7 and v9; v7 almost complete with some features of 8 and 9; see http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/
not stable(?) - which seems the most discussed part. On my machines it runs very well

Maybe there is more to be on that lists. And also we could collect some more information on the stability of gnash.

Ant P. · Watchman Joined: 18 Apr 2009 Posts: 6920

It's pretty useless in its current state, I don't think I've ever managed to make it play any video. But it might as well be marked stable now, it doesn't seem to crash and there haven't been any updates in months.

phajdan.jr · Posted: Sat Apr 24, 2010 3:53 pm Post subject:

I think the rules are quite clear, see http://devmanual.gentoo.org/keywording/index.html#moving-from-~arch-to-arch.

I think that feature-incompleteness shouldn't prevent it from going stable. On the other hand, if it crashes frequently or hangs the browser, I would call it an outstanding issue, preventing the stabilization.
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chithanh · Posted: Sun Apr 25, 2010 7:33 am Post subject:

I am using Gnash 0.8.7 with SeaMonkey, and it is only bearable when I also have FlashBlock active. Some Flash animations will hang the browser, and many will not display at all. I agree that it is much better than previous versions, but not quite enough to unleash it on unsuspecting stable users.

However, the next beta release of Gnash seems to improve nicely and is probably a good candidate for stable.

wswartzendruber · Posted: Tue May 18, 2010 6:00 pm Post subject:

Has anyone looked into the Lightspark Flash player?

chithanh · Posted: Thu May 20, 2010 8:12 pm Post subject:

Lightspark works in even less cases than Gnash. And it has no audio support. And it crashes here if I don't force software OpenGL rendering.