… will be finally getting rid of XMMS. Last night I’ve masked it, as Luis wants to leave us 🙁
Once again the problem is that XMMS has no maintainer, has no upstream, it’s bugged like hell, and it’s an old piece of crap right now. If you still are using XMMS, you should consider modern alternatives like Audacious, Amarok, BMPx, MPD, Rythmbox, and XMMS2 that will enter portage sooner or later.
With XMMS, also all the plugins will go away, and all the software that depends on xmms. The xmms useflag is now use.masked too so if you run a -NuavD world you’ll see some packages needing a rebuild for the removed useflag.
This time there won’t be way to save XMMS, because we’re really sticking to a software that is dead and should remain dead. If you don’t think any of the current players suits your need but XMMS, you probably need either to write your own, or fix the problems in the ones currently used.
No, I’m not trying to “break Gentoo”, I’m trying to remove unmaintained, broken stuff that will not be maintained by any developer. And no, I’m not going to move it to an overlay as Luis planned, as I don’t trust having unmaintained stuff in “official” overlays.
Edit: for those wondering, my birthday is not now, it’s November 28th, which means around the date when XMMS is going to be cvs rm -f’d out 🙂
Nooooooo. Oh alright then. =P I’ve put off switching away from it for too long now. I’ll miss gkrellmss.
Hi Diego!There’s also x11-plugins/wmxmms, which wasn’t on your masking list on gentoo-dev.RegardsChristian
Christian, I’ve masked the remaining packages a while ago now, they weren’t rdepending on it so I looked for xmms on packages.gentoo.org to mask them.
I’m glad you are going to remove XMMS from Portage… well done!
🙁 too sad thx for the time you maintain it. I will miss the lovley Alarm-Plugin.
Core: at least Amarok has a (3rd party) script which adds alarm functionality to Amarok. Maybe you should try that.
I know several people, including myself, who use XMMS as their primary media player…I’ve personally used it for 8 years now.Gloating over its demise makes you sound like Gollum, or, worse, an asshole.
Aurisor, then I suppose you should take XMMS code and maintain it yourself as upstream, because as it is, it has many years of unmaintained code that is not working properly on many systems. It’s unmaintained, and that’s the primary problem… and the secondary is that GTK 1.x is not unicode safe and we get people asking for UTF-8 support in XMMS… which is basically impossible because of that.We’re always open to other solution, but up to now Luis just mitigated the problem, not solved it. XMMS is unmaintained code that requires to be punted if nobody decides to fork it and continue it… but who would continue using GTK 1 at this time? More than one project started out of XMMS, but they took way different roads now, _included_ the original authors.
I vote we add a virtual/xmms and install audacious instead. 😉
I don’t think this is a good idea. It works just fine in its current form, and it’s not breaking anything. I imagine several folks will be confused and upset by this decision. You should probably reconsider. It’s not broke, why fix it?
Sure won’t miss xmms in itself (should have switched a long time ago), but it will take some time to find substitutes to all the great plugins it had! On to the quest for another suitable player (zinf is gone, surely not amarok, …)Or maybe I’ll pull out the x11amp binary I still have lying around on a old hard drive 😉
Thank you for finally giving me a reason to say good bye to Gentoo.
I agree that it’s time to axe xmms and move on…never said otherwise.But really, you could have said this:”Hey guys, xmms is no longer maintained upstream, it could potentially become a security liability, and no one wants to maintain it anymore. If anyone’s interested in picking it up, contact xxxx@xxxx.com, or try some more modern software.”A lot of people, myself and the other two guys in my office included, had no idea that XMMS was in such bad shape. A lot of people are going to be coming to this page in WTF-mode and I think making it sound like some kind of personal grudge against XMMS is going to cause some unnecessary reactions and confusion.Just my two cents.
THis is about the 14000000 time punting xmms has come up, flameeyes finally followed through with it. I don’t really think that another “if no one speaks up, then it will be punted” email would have changed anything, as it surely didn’t that last number of times.
The plugins can be easily replaced.. if you’re not a developer yourself you might find someone to pay to write them if you really want. I admit there are some plugins that are difficult to find right now in other players, but I don’t think any killer app is remaining.And as Dan said, this is not the first time XMMS faces this destiny, it was saved twice or more before, but now it’s come to an end.And for all the people saying “it worked for me you should have left it there”, I’d like to take down your names and see how much you’d rant if a package in the tree didn’t work for you (but worked for someone else)…Again, if anybody is going to maintain XMMS, I’d be fine with that and probably re-add it back… but, well, nobody is maintaining XMMS upstream, and nobody in Gentoo wants to take care of it anymore.
Well done! it was time to remove it!
There’s lots of plugins that might never be available outside of XMMS, or be ported to Audacious.Debian seems to be using an upstream snapshot – 20061010. Why aren’t we?
Because as stated a couple of hundreds times before: nobody in Gentoo wants to waste time on a dead software.And about the plugins, they should all be portable, if you can do that, you can pay someone to.
There has been two reactions on the forums – omg nooooo! and Audacious plugin development given a push.In reflection, its the right thing to do.
That’s just a _very_ arrogant way to handle the problem.
Audacious doesn’t support MOD files out of the box. When XMMS came out, MP3’s didn’t even EXIST!XMMS has OpenGL visualisations, which other players support that?
Neither does XMMS, you need the plugin. The same is true for Audacious, modplug support is present in the default plugins. And it supports OpenGL visualisations, exactly as Amarok does.Think about it when you’re convinced to know everything.
Oh forgot to say that “When XMMS came out, MP3’s didn’t even EXIST!” is simply false. Check your facts straight before trying to rant about others’ work.
I had already switched over to xfmedia (quite happily, though it is still a bit buggy). I’ve never been a fan of skinned media players. I like the fact that xmms uses native xfce window bars and stuff, rather than some custom stuff. Right now xfmedia is perfect for what I want.The only problem I think I have is that mplayer depends on xmms for audio, right? Well, I guess xine is better than mplayer anyway.
Actually Flameeye’s you are a VERY ingnorant and extremely disrespectful to the creator’s of XMMS. As Aurisor said, you could have used better wording than having to say it was a peice of crap.You have forgotten that some of us poor souls still use old machines which players like Amorock practically kill after about 10 minutes of using it. At least XMMS isn’t a resource hog and frankly I happen to find it LESS buggy than many of the other suggestions/alternative players that have been mentioned.Let me salute you for being one of the most ignorant people I have come across in the Gentoo community. I have no doubt you are going to be one of the major drivers that will eventually hurt Gentoo. Your reactions and comments are NOT needed and shows your complete arrogance towards other projects.I am now changing distributions. Not because you and you alone have decided to get rid of XMMS, but simply because of your attitude and ignorance. Gentoo simply isn’t the same community it used to be and that my friend has been caused by people like yourself. The sooner you leave the better otherwise Gentoo is going to loose the respect it once had about 2 years ago!I salute you and Gentoo! Bye bye!
I wonder why, if the authors thought XMMS was a shiny and perfect software, they did start XMMS2 from scratch instead of evolving it, hm?
Flameeyes,No-one said it was shiny or perfect. I think the point Tony was making was that your comments were very disrespectful and uncalled for. I have to agree with him on that point.As a developer who obviously puts in a lot of hard yards I think you of all people should have been a little more courteous. You surely understand the amount of effort that goes into writing an application and appreciate the praise you receive don’t you? especially doing it for nothing?Those who bag Audacious should also lighten up and be thankful that such media players even exist for linux.It’s nobody’s “right” but rather a “privilege” to be able to have such software available to them.Just my 2c worth.
http://gentoo-wiki.com/Xmms…
I agree completely with the reasoning to remove/mask XMMS, although I do have one problem with the removal of the xmms tree from portage entirely. Perhaps it’s simply because I had the old xmms USE flag turned on (it’s not now), but more than just xmms seemed to depend on xmms… granted, some of these were rather esoteric packages, but a removal which might completely break some dependencies in the portage tree (as the mask seemed to) could be disasterous.I understand wanting to remove old, broken, and unmaintained software, but please remember that there may be other packages that still depend on xmms. Hopefully, my situation was just caused by an old xmms USE flag, but it would be nice to keep xmms in portage, but simply hard-masked. That way, there’s hopefully less questions about “Why doesn’t XMMS work?” and people willing to accept XMMS with all the bugs still have the option.In any case, best of luck to you, and a future happy birthday. Even though the classic xmms is no longer supported, it’s nice to see people realizing its limitations and writing several great media players, on par with some of the popular commercial software today.
Main Problem:- There is _NO_ other player where you could use a playlist of 50k files to access _every_ song you have within 1-2 seconds by simply typing j and search for the song. This feature is awesome – audacious, winamp have it – but those players give up with some 10k files already… – J-tting just saves a lot of time – If you know some other usable player, just let me know.