Advogato blog for fatal

9 Nov 2003

Sun, 9 Nov 2003 05:02:46 GMT

Another one.

Another person has decided to call a project for "xmms2". I don't know what's up with people and superimposing the number 2 just because they're porting something to GTK+2. I've quite frankly had it up to here with this. Sure, it's a nice way of showing that "hey, we're up to specs with the latest and greatest of GTK+" but it's wrecking havoc for us involved with XMMS. First XMMS2.0.0-pre1 was announced by someone who actually had done a tremendous work porting the aging codebase of XMMS over to GTK+2. So I mailed him. That project is now called Beep, since apparently he has no interest whatsoever in XMMS, but I'll rant about that later.

And now I stumbled across a project on savannah named, you guessed it: xmms2. Which is made by a person I've seen around on the forum from time to time. It's most likely not as mature as the Beep port, but still. Why XMMS2? It's looking more and more that we'll have to let the cat out of the bag on a bigger scale. I can't sit and hunt around for people naming their projects XMMS2.

*SIGH*

Beep

So, I did mail the guy responsible for this fork. Don't get me wrong, I'm not in any way trying to make people _not_ fork XMMS. By all means, it's permitted by the GPL. What struck me as odd was the reply I got back. He didn't answer _any_ of my inqueries, but instead it was really nothing at all in his reply. So what did I miss from his reply? Well, the thing is I told him that we had been planning a GTK+2 port for some time, and that we'd love to see him work on XMMS with us. Considering it would really help endorse people to port their plugins to GTK+2 and not create a big gap and confusion for the users in general. But no reply on that part. I'm reluctant to mail him again, but we're starting to feel the effects of this, once Beep becomes more widespread I think it will get alot worse.

*SIGH*

4Front

So, it's no secret that the XMMS project was sponsored by 4Front Technologies a couple of years ago and they've remained in the background since then. Mostly trying to force us to take some direction, put up another commercial plugin on the homepage etc. Latest outburst from them is that they're going to be attending a linux expo and demo XMMS. And for some, which is beyond me, reason they will present XMMS as a videoplayer. Damnit, we're not a videoplayer. Not at all. Sure, there are plugins to play video through avifile, smpeg and mplayer. But really, video belongs to Xine/Ogle/Mplayer/etc. XMMS has always been and will always be targeted for music playback. 4Front will have a fit when the sponsored logo disappears from the site on our 6th anniversery.

*SIGH*

4 Nov 2003

Tue, 4 Nov 2003 03:43:24 GMT

Finally got around to port the current XMMS site to some more sane HTML standards. The old ways of messing about with silly tricks and make the browsers jump through hoops just to make some small borders around a few blocks of text is OVER for me. Never again. I'm going to refuse such assignments on my daytime work, if it can't be done with proper HTML I won't do it, even if it means I'll have to quit. Oh well, I'll probably never finish it anyway. Just one more of those rewrites that I never get the energy to actually post on the page.

Work is moving along quite slowly while the list of things to do just grows and grows. Anyone interested in taking care of updating the pluginlisting on xmms.org?

Manage the skin submissions?

Answer supportmails?

14 Oct 2002

Mon, 14 Oct 2002 15:50:53 GMT

Redhat 8.0 XMMS

MP3
- Removed support for MP3's
- Fails to install the "Information" plugin, leaving most users clueless.
ARTS
- Segfaults if it's not installed
Skin
- Patches the source to use the "Bluecurve" skin.
- Use default skin? mkdir ~/.xmms/Skins/XMMSDEFAULT
Users
- Two weeks later I've had atleast 30 people not being competent enough to read www.xmms.org. They do however visit www.xmms.org to get my email adress.

...and thus making me recieve atleast two mails a day about bugs in XMMS.

I love Redhat