On Saturday 09,January,2010 08:59 AM, bornagainpenguin wrote: > > Let's see. Here we go... > > >> Your support from Canonical for Ubuntu Hardy is good until April 2011. > Correct. >> However, Canonical supports only packages within the official repositories. > As I >> mentioned in my previous e-mail, the PPA is a third party repository, under > the >> PPA maintainer's jurisdiction, i.e. me, in the case of all the > ~banshee-team PPAs. > > Why should I as an end user not expect to be able to upgrade to the latest > versions of the applications in the PPA, in this case that application being > the 1.5.x version of Banshee? The whole reason for the PPA is to allow > users to be able to run application versions not in the default > repositories! If my version of Ubuntu is supported and there is a PPA, why > wouldn't I expect there to be a recent version of the application for me to > install? Actually I believe the PPAs were really intended as a testing ground for bugfixes to packages prior to upload. Using it for new upstream releases is just something we, among other PPA maintainers who do this kind of thing decided to do. As I've mentioned before, Canonical only supports what's in the official repositories. PPAs are a third party effort, and unsupported by Canonical at all. Considering anybody is able to create a PPA, how do you expect Canonical to take responsibility of anything and everything that goes wrong in a PPA? >> Yes, and it still won't compile correctly. Perhaps the next version of > Banshee >> will. Frankly speaking, maintaining Banshee and all related packages for > three >> versions of Ubuntu in a PPA single-handedly is not an easy task to do, and > three >> releases back is as far as I can go. > > Then it is inaccurate to say that Banshee is supporting the LTS releases, > isn't it? Nobody ever said that Banshee supports the LTS release. Canonical supports the Ubuntu LTS releases, for the software included in the official repositories. > >> I am a student who needs to spend time studying after all. > > While yes, I **do** appreciate that students need to study and that Banshee > like many other FOSS applications is done by volunteers, this is still an > excuse. One that wears thin quite frankly... If Linux ever hopes to be > able to become a mainstream desktop operating system it needs to be able to > provide applications that work and are current. Telling users to upgrade to > fix bugs when the only way to upgrade is to install a more recent edition of > their operating system is not something that goes over well! > >> You're welcome to help maintain the Hardy and Intrepid bits if you feel > sidelined or ignored. > > Really? And what if I am not a programmer? What if I'm merely a prodigious > end-user whose managed to slowly learn enough about Linux, FOSS, *NIX, etc > to run his desktop? What then? > > I love how if there's a complaint non-programmers are invited to fix it > themselves or shut up... I've been on both sides of this argument before. Fact is, there are limited developers. Limited developers have limited time. Arguments like this also take up time. And please note that I did not tell you to shut up if you can't fix it yourself. I merely invited you to join the ranks of the developers, since nobody else (including myself) seems to really have the interest in maintaining a whole set of packages (Banshee, its extensions and its direct dependencies) for the older versions of Ubuntu. It also doesn't help that I run the latest stable, and that three versions of Ubuntu back, it was pretty different from what it is like now, at least where the packaging work is concerned. > >> Ubuntu Karmic 9.10 is not bleeding edge. It is a stable version of Ubuntu >> released in October this year, and it has current Banshee packages in the > PPA >> uploaded by me. > > That's great--but I'm on a netbook, (an eeepc to be specific) and if I > upgrade to Karmic I get hit with a bug that causes my system to crash hard > if I turn off my WiFi. This was a known issue that was ignored in the rush > to get the Karmic release out the door on time. The canonical developers > promised a quick fix would be made once the system was released, now they've > decided to let "upstream" fix it. Then there's the removal of battstat, the > awful theming issues (hint defaults should not break *other* defaults), > issues with Grub2, etc etc... Wifi issue eh? Looks very much like this: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/404626, and hey look it says "Karmic: Fix Released". Removal of battstat? There's still the GNOME Power Manager notification area icon that displays your battery status pretty well (note that in Karmic, GNOME Power Manager has been souped up quite a bit). Awful theming issues? What theming issues?! If you don't like the theme, then change it! I've hated Ubuntu's brown themes from day one of using Ubuntu. But I don't use that as an excuse to hate Ubuntu as a whole. There are many distros with prettier faces that don't function as well as Ubuntu out there. Issues with Grub2? I haven't seen any issue with Grub2, really. Name one issue with Grub2 that you have, and look for the bug report. For all you know, it might have been fixed in Karmic already. > > How is something with that many problems NOT bleeding edge? > >> If you consider Karmic as "bleeding edge", and are not "willing to ride the >> bleeding edge", then there is no reason for you to use Banshee 1.5.2 >> either, because by your definition, that would be "bleeding edge" as well. > > Well, yes--but supposedly there is support for the nonstandard resolution of > netbooks in the more recent editions of banshee, so I'm eager to try it out > to see if I can get the netbook "skin" to work for me so I don't have the > application doing squats on me whenever I plug in my mp3 player. Then > there's the fact due to banshee no longer being updated for Hardy it is > nearly impossible to get the lyrics plugin to install thanks to dependency > hell--something I thought I'd seen the last of when I left Windows behind. The netbook remix of Banshee is called Cubano and hasn't actually been released before, unless I am mistaken. >> Please understand that it takes time and resources to continue supporting > old >> versions of software. We at Ubuntu try to extend our support as long as > possible >> for our releases, but there is also a limit to how much we can support. > Ubuntu's >> policy is that once we have released, we will only push bugfixes to the > users, >> not new upstream releases. New upstream releases will go into the "latest > and >> greatest version of Ubuntu" as you have put it. > > That's not my issue--my issue is when features get lost in the shuffle--like > the lyrics plugin for example. The lyrics plugin was perfectly installable > until about six months ago when suddenly the application was updated, but > the plugin wasn't. Since I'd lost my backup of Ubuntu while testing out > Jaunty (which had its own issues) I had no choice but to reinstall Hardy > from scratch, which is when suddenly I found myself unable to install the > lyrics plugin. Before I trashed my working Hardy install for the "upgrade" > I had that plugin working fine for Banshee, installed from the PPA like > Banshee itself--now it was no where to be found! > > Bugfixes only you say? Fine--but don't remove features when you do so! Keep in mind that the bugfixes-only policy applies to the official Ubuntu archives and that if you have never used the PPA in the first place, you wouldn't have found the lyrics plugin to have gone missing. Rather, it wouldn't even have been there in the first place, since the lyrics plugin was only available via the PPA. If the Banshee PPA adopted a bugfix-only approach, there would be no point to having it around -- just use the stuff in the Ubuntu archives. Fact is, we're using the lack of QC in the PPAs as a medium to attempt to bring a newer version of Banshee to you. > >> If you've begun distro-shopping, good luck, and have fun with your next > distro >> and next media player. I think you'd be hard pressed to find another media >> player as good as Banshee, or (in my opinion) a distro as good as Ubuntu. > > Chances are I'll ride Rhythmbox again the next time I install, since it has > a working iTunes podcast handler, a lyrics plugin installed by default, > doesn't go nuts when I plug in my mp3player, gives me summaries of the > podcast episodes, etc etc... Sure it isn't as pretty as Banshee, but it has > less hassles in the long run. > > As for Ubuntu itself? I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't be missing it. > I've been using Ubuntu since Warty, and have been a major fan of it since > then. Many of the things in Ubuntu "just work" the way I'd have done it > myself. It feels like home. > > But I can't keep on running an operating system that is several releases > behind precisely because applications like Banshee aren't supported. I > can't upgrade because of hardware support and application needs issues. It > looks like my only choices are to move somewhere else. I don't **want** to > move, I just don't seem to have any other choices. Right, because other distributions using the same kernels, and same upstream software are going to have these issues magically fixed. These issues don't just come from nowhere you know. They're issues inherited from upstream. > > --bornagainpenguin -- Kind regards, Chow Loong Jin (GPG: 0x8F02A411) Ubuntu Contributing Developer
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