The C# Conspiracy?
Oh fun, the great Novell vs Red Hat war rears it's ugly head again. Now that Sound Juicer and Totem both play CDs we're nicely on route to dropping gnome-cd totally. To this end, a few weeks ago Ronald filed a bug with gnome-volume-manager asking that the default be changed to Sound Juicer (I'm thinking this should be Totem, but that's just my opinion).
Today the bug was closed. Hooray, I thought, SJ is the new default CD player. But no:
we're going to default to Banshee instead.
Pardon? We, the gnome-volume-manager maintainers, who happen to be Novell employees, have decided that the default CD player in GNOME will be Banshee. Not only is this not part of GNOME, but it's written in C#. I'm pissed off as this isn't a valid reason to close the bug, considering it isn't even proposed for Desktop, and I bet Red Hat will be pissed off if C# enters the Desktop.
And on that note, I'm going to cook.
Update: all sorted now. Totem is the default CD player. Die gnome-cd die!
Posted by Stephan K. at Mon Aug 15 18:51:59 2005:
....right.
Whatever happened to Rhythmbox?
Why did Sonance get renamed to Banshee anyways?
So I really have high hopes for 'Banshee', I've been keeping my eye on it for a while, but I can't help but think the same that this is going to be another fun ride. And that's only mildly sarcastic.
Posted by Andy Piper at Mon Aug 15 19:54:00 2005:
Whatever happened to Rhythmbox?
Why did Sonance get renamed to Banshee anyways?
So I really have high hopes for 'Banshee', I've been keeping my eye on it for a while, but I can't help but think the same that this is going to be another fun ride. And that's only mildly sarcastic.
It looks like the decision has been repealed - see <a href="http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/gnome-volume-manager/gnome-volume-manager.schemas.in?rev=1.21&view=log">http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/gnome-volume-manager/gnome-volume-manager.schemas.in?rev=1.21&view=log</a>
Looks like it will be Totem instead of Banshee or SJ...
Posted by Josh at Mon Aug 15 20:02:25 2005:
Looks like it will be Totem instead of Banshee or SJ...
"I bet Red Hat will be pissed off if C# enters the Desktop"
Why? Red Hat hasnt given the community the slightest indication of what is wrong with adopting Mono. All I hear is Havoc spouting off about forking/dropping Gnome if Mono became a dependency. Even the Fedora Core Project which is supposedly independent won't include Mono while the rest of Linux distros have no hesitation.
This is more like * vs Red Hat. They've had more than a year to sort this garbage out but still this is an issue for those idiots.
Lets all hold hands and pray that Red Hat goes bankrupt so we don't have to deal with all their bullshit.
Posted by Sven Neumann at Mon Aug 15 20:20:42 2005:
Why? Red Hat hasnt given the community the slightest indication of what is wrong with adopting Mono. All I hear is Havoc spouting off about forking/dropping Gnome if Mono became a dependency. Even the Fedora Core Project which is supposedly independent won't include Mono while the rest of Linux distros have no hesitation.
This is more like * vs Red Hat. They've had more than a year to sort this garbage out but still this is an issue for those idiots.
Lets all hold hands and pray that Red Hat goes bankrupt so we don't have to deal with all their bullshit.
Seriously, the only reasonable CD player for GNOME that I have come along so far is goobox. Sound Juicer is designed to be a CD ripper and it happens to also play CDs now. Goobox is designed to be a CD player and it happens to also rip CDs. The user interface is nice, unobtrusive and it does the job just right. Never understood why goobox has been deliberately ignored. It should have replaced gnome-cd long ago. Oh well, probably just corporate politics :(
Posted by Ross at Mon Aug 15 20:27:23 2005:
Sven: goobox has been ignored for Desktop as at the time it was proposed SJ was more mature and distributed. SJ is a ripper which can play CDs, yes, that is the design. It's not a player by definition, but plays as that is required in a ripper.
If you can think of anything in SJ which can be improved without impacting on the interface, I'd happily listen.
Posted by Emmanuele at Mon Aug 15 20:41:31 2005:
If you can think of anything in SJ which can be improved without impacting on the interface, I'd happily listen.
oh well, I've already set SJ as my default command to execute when inserting an audio cd, so this doesn't change a iota my current setup... ;-)
(yes, this is a useless comment - here just to thank Ross for his awesome work)
Posted by JanC at Mon Aug 15 20:42:02 2005:
(yes, this is a useless comment - here just to thank Ross for his awesome work)
IMHO the best solution would be that the default cd-player app would have a button / menu option to launch the default cd-ripper app...
Posted by William at Mon Aug 15 23:35:23 2005:
"I bet Red Hat will be pissed off if C# enters the Desktop"
So? Why should anyone outside of RHAT headquarters care? Red Hat has made it clear that they won't include Mono in their disto, but will not tell the rest of the community why that is. That makes me very suspicious of their motives.
Have they entered into some secret agreement that forbids them from doing anything with Mono? Do they know about .NET patent issues the rest of us don't and hope to see all the other Gnome distributors (like Novell and Sun) get clobbered with lawsuits? Do they just not like the cut of Miguel's jib?
Whatever the case may be, I think the best course of action is to completely ignore their objection to Mono/C#. Force them to choose between sharing the reasoning behind their anti-Mono stance, or shipping a crippled desktop.
Posted by Sven Neumann at Tue Aug 16 00:47:31 2005:
So? Why should anyone outside of RHAT headquarters care? Red Hat has made it clear that they won't include Mono in their disto, but will not tell the rest of the community why that is. That makes me very suspicious of their motives.
Have they entered into some secret agreement that forbids them from doing anything with Mono? Do they know about .NET patent issues the rest of us don't and hope to see all the other Gnome distributors (like Novell and Sun) get clobbered with lawsuits? Do they just not like the cut of Miguel's jib?
Whatever the case may be, I think the best course of action is to completely ignore their objection to Mono/C#. Force them to choose between sharing the reasoning behind their anti-Mono stance, or shipping a crippled desktop.
Ross, thanks for having goobox considered. I was afraid that it would have been ignored. I had been under the impression that the decision you are referring to was about the default CD ripper application to include with the GNOME desktop. But I see the point of including just a single app that does both.
Posted by Jon Dowland at Tue Aug 16 10:21:27 2005:
It seems that a great deal of innovation in the GNOME world, even if not officially GNOME, has been with C#/mono stuff in recent times: beagle, tomboy... About the only argument I can think of against considering mono for GNOME proper is the shortage of refined developer tools.
Posted by Sven Neumann at Tue Aug 16 10:22:22 2005:
Ross, I have to admit that I haven't tried the latest version of sound-juicer yet. But since you asked for suggestions, I should probably tell you what I don't like about the version that Debian installed for me.
But then you said, if it doesn't impact the user interface and all my suggestions do impact the user interface since that's IMO the weak spot of sound-juicer. Biggest problem of all is that it is way too large for a CD player. For a CD player, the track list should be hidden by default. And I want cover art w/o me worrying where it gets that picture from. Goobox does this nicely for me and the user interface is more compact and more polished. This is probably because it tries to be a CD player first of all.
Posted by Internet Blister at Sat Feb 2 23:45:22 2008:
But then you said, if it doesn't impact the user interface and all my suggestions do impact the user interface since that's IMO the weak spot of sound-juicer. Biggest problem of all is that it is way too large for a CD player. For a CD player, the track list should be hidden by default. And I want cover art w/o me worrying where it gets that picture from. Goobox does this nicely for me and the user interface is more compact and more polished. This is probably because it tries to be a CD player first of all.
