Do we need a sound recorder in the default install?

[Iain Lane]

Hey,

In the course of working towards porting our default desktop to using
GStreamer 1.0, one of the last holdouts is the venerable gnome-media
package, also known as "Sound Recorder".

I discovered from reading around on the web that the maintainer thinks
it's a dead project.

  https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=679381

and (linked from this bug) that there is a more GNOME3-ish rewrite in
progress (which unfortunately doesn't use gstreamer-1.0 yet, but as it
doesn't do as many things as gnome-media [and uses Vala], porting should
be easier. Bindings do exist now).

  http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnome.multimedia/1893

I think we should remove gnome-media from the default install. In
addition to not being ported and being EOLed upstrem, it seems to be
quite crashy now. There are some bad reviews on the software centre too;
I don't think it's providing a good experience to our users
notwithstanding the lack of a finished/working gst-1.0 port.

If we do do this, should we replace it with another microphone recording
application? Is this a usecase that we think is important for the
default install? gnome-sound-recorder (the rewrite) would require some
engineering commitment to port to 1.0 and resolve bugs (for example it
segfaults here as soon as I click 'record' ;-)). Unless someone knows of
another suitable lightweight recording app.

Cheers,

-- 
Iain Lane                                  [ iain at orangesquash.org.uk ]
Debian Developer                                   [ laney at debian.org ]
Ubuntu Developer                                   [ laney at ubuntu.com ]
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