Whither XMMS? [SOLVED]

yabbadabbadont · Posted: Mon Oct 23, 2006 10:25 pm Post subject:

Yeah, and the Changelog doesn't even have anything in it about it either.

Edit: http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=152472

Edit2: After reading through the comments, I was surprised to see the devs being jerks. Yes, the users could have been more polite, but since the devs did not give any warning about masking all xmms related packages, it was kind of understandable. I just went back and re-read last weeks GWN. There was nothing in the package removal section about xmms....

koprimer · n00b Joined: 29 Feb 2004 Posts: 63

I'm going to miss xmms and all its great plugins. Its been good to me for so many years, regaurdless what others say it'll always be the best audio player in my opinion. I'll settle for Audacious for now but only until xmms2 is released.

I honestly don't agree with gentoo's decision to require others to switch audio players. It would have been nice if they waited to hard mask xmms until the xmms2 release. But this wouldn't be the first time a program was hard masked on the portage tree without a successor.

It truely is annoying to have to reconfigure your system (in this case, my keymappings, auto-play settings, etc) everytime you want to update world because gentoo requires the removal or manual update on a piece of software. Sure we can all update our individual packages manually to bypass whatever problems occur when updating world, or we can all just not update at all and be happy with our current system. Gentoo gives us so many options to choose from, unfortunately the "correct" path to take is not the easiest for a gentoo user. Damn you gentoo for wasting another 2 hours of my life (j/k gentoo, I love you, yet hate you at the same time).

totopo · n00b Joined: 29 Sep 2004 Posts: 73 Location: Austria

Great, really great, some work to do for the weekend:

marcion · Posted: Mon Oct 23, 2006 10:46 pm Post subject:

Absolutely crazy, the lunatics have taken over the asylum:

onlinepancakes · Posted: Mon Oct 23, 2006 11:30 pm Post subject:

stupidkid · Posted: Mon Oct 23, 2006 11:43 pm Post subject:

Hmm, audacious supports Chinese characters. That's definitely a plus. Also It'd be nice if the docklet had some form of indicating the status of audacious, i.e. paused, stopped, or playing.
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mikegpitt · Advocate Joined: 22 May 2004 Posts: 3152

I'm also a little annoyed by this. Personally I don't use xmms as a music player, but for years I have kept in minimized in the corner of my desktop and use it to change my system volume. I like how I can change it when I put my mouse over xmms and use the scroll wheel.

I guess if it really gets removed then we could use the ebuild in an overlay.

i92guboj · Posted: Tue Oct 24, 2006 12:13 am Post subject:

This same conversation started in several places. But if no one is willing to maintain it, then there is nothing to do, that is, unless someone around is willing to maintain a package with no upstream support at all *looks around ^^ *. Usually, to have options is a good thing, but, well, the maintainer has also the option to become bored and leave. One thing is to make ebuilds, and another, to deal with packages that have been abbandonned by their maintainers since quite some time ago.

The latest xmms release is 1.2.10, and was announced Feb 23, 2004, more than 2 years and a half ago. Being a buggy product, I really think that it is time to consider it a dead end, unless someone is willing to retake that job again. Dont take me wrong, I'm all for options, and would really like to have zillions of alternatives, being, why not? xmms one of them. But I think that it is time for we to let xmms go, not based in a personall preference (I dont really have anything against that kind of player at all) I just think that an -r16 in a package whose last version is dated more than 2 years ago is more than enough imo.

Maybe there are people who love xmms, true, maybe xmms2 is not ready and maybe all the rest of xmms alikes are not the same than xmms, and even if they were, you will always miss some plugins (and some people, and that is harder to understand, will even miss gtk1, when, if lightness is really a must, there are lots of non-graphicall interfaces that are lighter and probably more stable). Just my thoughts, it is always difficult to see something that you have used for a lot of years going aways, but, as someone said, the overlays are always an option, even binaries can be used if needed. It is impossible to please always everybody, but, surely, if some maintainer(s) would have volunteered to maintain this stuff, it would surely not be on way to the realm of the forgotten.

yabbadabbadont · Posted: Tue Oct 24, 2006 12:28 am Post subject:

Personally, I'm not upset about it being removed from portage. It is unmaintained, both here and upstream. What annoyed me, and probably most others too, is that there was absolutely no notice that it was slated for removal. I thought that was why the pending removal section was added to the GWN. I've already made the suggestion in the User Representative forum that the procedure be changed such that the package should be listed in the GWN *prior* to masking it for removal. As long as people know that change is coming, then they don't get as upset about it as when they are blindsided during an update world operation.

Noven · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 27 Mar 2005 Posts: 138

I love XMMS too and am very sad that it is being removed. However the devs do have a point - with no-one maintaining it and a ton of open bugs (even though not a single one of them has affected me) it is unprofessional to leave it in portage. This isn't the only audio package in need of a maintainer - hopefully someone will step forward. Until I learn to program and step forward to fix such issues I'm not going to whinge at the developers for making such decisions. Personally I will unmask it for my own system and continue to use it until I have a pressing need to do otherwise.
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arpunk · n00b Joined: 13 Jun 2006 Posts: 61 Location: Colombia

yabbadabbadont · Posted: Tue Oct 24, 2006 1:27 am Post subject:

arpunk · n00b Joined: 13 Jun 2006 Posts: 61 Location: Colombia

userwaldo · n00b Joined: 26 Nov 2004 Posts: 7

Rather than a hard mask, they should mark it as unstable. I did a search for xmms at bugs.gentoo.org and found only a few issues, none of which seemed significant enough to hard mask xmms.

There has been a lot of work put into including xmms and the numerous plug-ins in the portage tree. It sure seems a wast to hard-mask them out. At least if they are marked as unstable, people don't have to start from scratch to build the necessary ebuilds to keep using xmms.

antarus · Developer Joined: 16 May 2005 Posts: 74 Location: Michigan

DoktorSeven · Posted: Tue Oct 24, 2006 4:27 am Post subject:

Every one of the XMMS "alternatives" listed in the "pending removal" message, in my experience, is more unstable and buggy than XMMS has ever been. I've tried them all, and they are all much buggier in my experience than XMMS has ever been. Yes, even (ESPECIALLY) Amarok.

Yeah, I'm pissed over this decision. I'll get over it, but it's just something that makes no sense. At least throw it in unstable and shrug your shoulders when someone puts a bug report in. Funny though that all the bugs I saw for XMMS were minor, at best. Sounds like you just want an excuse to promote the other players and leave what you perceive as an inferior player behind.
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nkmcc · n00b Joined: 22 Nov 2005 Posts: 13

Well said.

jstead1 · Posted: Tue Oct 24, 2006 4:45 am Post subject:

My two cents.
I understand and agree with the reasons for dropping XMMS. It is difficult to provide support for a project that has basically been abandoned.

You can argue over the timing, and the lack of notification is a bit unusual.

On the other hand, updating the system to account for getting rid of xmms is, at least in my case, pretty trivial:
First, I delelted xmms from my use flags in /etc/make.conf.
Then I grep'd (hey a new word) my world file for xmms and only had xmms.
Next:

HeXiLeD · l33t Joined: 20 Aug 2005 Posts: 892 Location: online

yup well said.

anyway...
Diego Pettenò speaks again about xmms
source: http://farragut.flameeyes.is-a-geek.org/articles/2006/10/23/tiredness-2
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dmpogo · Advocate Joined: 02 Sep 2004 Posts: 2032 Location: Canada

dmpogo · Advocate Joined: 02 Sep 2004 Posts: 2032 Location: Canada

padoor · Advocate Joined: 30 Dec 2005 Posts: 3714 Location: india

lately xmms not playing problems have come up with kernel upgrades
may be no repairs to kernel or associated parts wont budge without other problems
the easier solution may be to discard xmms for taking other advantages of the system
upgrades.
you can protect your installed xmms by masking from upgrades .

i have liked the performance of alsaplayer but it has been removed without a replacement player.
i have the older one already installed still in my system despite it is a security hazard.
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dmpogo · Advocate Joined: 02 Sep 2004 Posts: 2032 Location: Canada

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