Fwd: Removing amarok

[Valorie Zimmerman]

On Thu, Sep 14, 2017 at 7:52 AM, Matt Ruffalo <matt.ruffalo at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2017-09-13 00:37, Simon Quigley wrote:
>> Hey Aaron,
>>
>> On 09/12/2017 03:54 PM, Aaron Honeycutt wrote:
>>> We already replaced it in AA. If your talking about removing fr archive
>>> all together that would be Ubuntu Developer no?
>> I'm asking feedback from the people who have maintained it since it was
>> introduced into the archive before asking for removal...
>>
>
> Hi all-
>
> I emailed Aaron about this privately, since I wasn't sure whether a
> "user" question/request was appropriate for a developer mailing list,
> and he suggested that I should send this to the mailing list also.

Yes, it's always best to ask here on the list rather than pinging
individual devels.

> As a long-time Kubuntu user, I was very surprised to see a kubuntu-devel
> mailing list posting about the removal of Amarok -- I had no idea that
> the package has "plenty of bugs, no active upstream (aka dead upstream)
> and no finished port to Qt5".

It's very sad to see. I used to be heavily involved in Amarok
development, and it's where I started my involvement in the KDE
community.

> I saw Aaron's note of "We already replaced it in AA" and was curious
> about this replacement -- I've been regularly doing some very light
> testing with the daily ISO images of Kubuntu 17.10 and I didn't realize
> that Amarok was no longer included. (I would be using 17.10 full-time on
> my laptop if not for what I mentioned in
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2017-August/039961.html,
> and "Amarok is missing" is one of the things that I definitely wouldn't
> notice with some light VM testing, so I suppose this is also some
> additional evidence of what I mentioned in that previous email.)

Just because we no longer provide Amarok on the DVD does not mean it
will be removed from your computer, or the Archive for that matter. As
long as it builds and works, it can remain. However, as dependencies
disappear, it will be more difficult for that to happen. This is
called "bit-rot" and it is what happens when the development team
stops developing.

> I'm quite interested to see what the replacement of Amarok is intended
> to be. I just booted an up-to-date daily ISO of Kubuntu 17.10 and the
> only music player I see is Canata, and after starting that up and
> playing with it a bit, it seems like it's missing a great deal of
> functionality compared to Amarok. My first impression is that it only
> seems to support a single directory in which all music files are stored,
> as opposed to Amarok's selection of multiple music folders. It also
> seems to not handle music on a read-only NFS mount, as I have done with
> Amarok since v1.4 on KDE 3 -- either that, or Canata is taking a very
> long time to index my collection, with no progress feedback whatsoever.
> This would make Canata effectively unusable for me, as I've been keeping
> all of my media on a file server with read-only shares for more than 15
> years, and I think this is a valid use case which should be supported by
> the standard music player in Kubuntu. (I also keep a few random things
> in ~/Music as well as the aforementioned NFS share, so I've really
> become used to having a music library that spans multiple folders.)
>
> Additionally, the setup wizard for Canata (the existence of which is
> already a large red flag in terms of usability for a default music
> player) contains many "gotchas" in the form of "NOTE:" and "Warning:"
> messages in this setup wizard, which wouldn't be very friendly to a less
> experienced user. I am rather familiar with Linux system administration,
> and I understand Canata's warning of "you're not in the 'users' group,
> Canata will function better if you are", and someone who is less
> technical will likely not take this as well, like "I just want to play
> my music files, why is this default music player warning me about so
> much, and telling me that my computer is misconfigured after a clean
> install of the OS? Why do I need to care what this 'MPD' thing is?
> Aren't I playing music through Canata?"
>
> Can a more usable music player be included with Kubuntu 17.10? I'm not
> at all familiar with the maintenance burden of keeping Amarok around,
> but would it be possible for its corpse to be kept on life support for a
> bit longer until a good alternative is available? (Aaron mentioned to me
> that "the one I would like in would be Babe-Qt but it's not packaged for
> Ubuntu yet so can only do so much at that point", and I'm not familiar
> with Babe-Qt, but it seems like anything will be better than Canata.)
>
> Thank you for your time,
> MMR...

Right now, Cantata seemed like the best choice, although I agree with
you that it is less than desirable. There is a new player now called
"Babe" (hopefully soon to be renamed) which has not yet has its first
release. When it is, we will re-assess. We didn't want to release
17.10 with no music player, and we couldn't justify Amarok.

For 18.04 we hope there will be better options.

By the way, you need not be a coder or even a packager to be on this
list, or indeed to be part of the team making these difficult
decisions, and getting Kubuntu out the door. We would welcome you,
Matt, and anyone else reading this to help us out! We need testers,
folks to write release docs and news stories, to help us spread the
message on social media, to help out with the podcast, read
documentation and help us improve it, as well as packaging and a bit
of programming now and then. And much, much more!

Thanks for sharing your experience,

Valorie

-- 
http://about.me/valoriez