Re: The future of Gnome CD Themes?

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Mon, 6 Jun 2005, Ronald S. Bultje wrote:

> Date: Mon, 06 Jun 2005 22:22:52 +0200
> From: Ronald S. Bultje <rbultje ronald bitfreak net>
> To: Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>
> Cc: gnome-multimedia gnome org
> Subject: Re: The future of Gnome CD Themes?
>
> Hi Alan,
>
> I noticed your patches in bugzilla - will check them out, thanks.
> However, ...

If any of my patches dont work first go then send the back.
Sometimes my patches are rushed and not as well tested as I might like.

> On Mon, 2005-06-06 at 21:03 +0100, Alan Horkan wrote:
> > >From what little information I've gathered I have gotten an impression
> > people want to kill off the themes for various reasons and use only Gnome
> > Themes.  Is there a specific plan to phase out themes, partly or
> > completely?
>
> ... Gnome-CD will be removed sometime soon. It'll be replaced by sound
> juicer, which will get a more player-like interface (see Ross' blog of

Nooooooooooooooooo!  Please, please, consider this very carefully.  :(

I'd heard you make threats before but I was hoping it wouldn't happen and
that was the big reason behind my taking a much closer look at Gnome CD
Player.  I'm trying to put money where my mouth is and get involved early
because if you stop including Gnome CD Player in gnome-media it is
immediately dead to me (always compiling my own copy or taking over
maintainership is not a practical option).

I followed a few threads on the Desktop Devel mailing lists relating to
sound juice and the CD player seems distant.  In one discussion I strongly
favoured a suggestion by Havoc Pennington the gist of which was that Sound
Juicer would stick to ripping and add a Play button that would make use of
an external player.  I fear the all-in-one integrated media player and to
me this suggestion fits better with the philosophy of "do one thing well"
(it also sounds a whole lot easier to implement).

> 16/6 '04), I've promised Ross I'd do some coding on this. Gnome-CD just
> doesn't cut it. It's interface doesn't fit in with the rest of GNOME,
> there's some memory issues in there that I find hard to solve, and it is
> very bonobo-integrated, which seems to have lost love in the GNOME
> community.  I can either recode it, or use something sane that's out
> there: sound juicer. At GUADEC this year, Ross and I agreed using S-J
> was the sanest solution. S-J has it all: it has a nice, GNOME'y UI, it
> is easy to use, has integrated ripping and is very intuitive.

I'm sure you are aware of the fear many people have of replacing existing
software with new software.  The Gnome Translation team do excellent work
but for minority languages I hate to see existing work thrown away and it
will be a long time before it all gets replaced, same goes for
Documentation.  Rather than go on and on about my concerns let me say you
could mitigate a whole lot of my concerns by "deprecating" Gnome CD Player
rather than chucking it out or attempting to replace it with sound juicer
and pushing users to switch.

Years ago Microsoft junked their CD Player and it annoyed me no end as I
liked the older simpler more straighforward CD Player (similarly I liked
Windows Media Player 6 better than anything they've done since) only by
doing a messy Windows 98 to Windows 2000 upgrade rather than a clean
install was I able to choose the software I actually wanted.  My tattered
old runners (tennis shoes) may be past their best but I've got them they
way I like 'em.

If it is not too much trouble I would greatly appreciate if you could make
any move to Sound Juicer a gradual transition until the choice becomes
entirely obvious and uncontraversial.

What I am asking is a marketing and social issue not really a techinical
one and I say please, please, please be a benolent dictator and grant me
this small favour.

Hope I've expressed my concern with being too whiney.

Thanks in advance

Sincerely

Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/

P.S.  If you could point me to where exactly the Track Editor Dialog lives
I'd apprecaite it.  I'd like to make some minor tweaks to the users
interface, line the widgets up with each other and not much more than
that.