[gentoo-dev] Re: Xmms needs to die.

["Duncan" <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net>]

Robert Cernansky <hslists2@zoznam.sk> posted
Mahogany-0.67.0-10670-20060824-143125.00@kihnet.sk, excerpted below, on 
Thu, 24 Aug 2006 14:31:25 +0200:

> On Thu, 24 Aug 2006 20:39:10 +1000 Jonathan Adamczewski
> <jadamcze@utas.edu.au> wrote:
> 
>> Robin H. Johnson wrote:
>> > don't take XMMS away from those of us already using it without any
>> > issues.
>> 
>> It can disappear from portage without affecting your ability to keep
>> using it.
> 
> Not true, when upgrading world I'll always get message like:
> 
> !!! Ebuilds for the following packages are either all !!! masked or don't
> exist:
> media-sound/xmms
> 
> And --depclean will be broken because it will want to remove all xmms
> dependencies. Maybe there are other issues with installed&not_in_portage
> packages.

That's what overlays (local or public/general) are for.  There's normally
a 30-day period the ebuild is masked, during which that warning will
appear with the 30-day explanation from profiles/package.mask, giving you
the chance to act accordingly and move it to your overlay, listing it in
package.unmask.  When the 30 days is over and it's removed from portage,
you still have it in your overlay.

Even if you don't sync and update during those 30 days and the ebuild is
removed from the tree, given that it's installed, you'll still have an
ebuild for it in /var/db/pkg/, and if you use FEATURES=buildpkg (as I do)
for backup purposes, you'll also have the ebuild attached to the end of
the binpkg tarball.  (I used that a couple times before I realized the
ebuild was already in /var/db/pkg.)

Even if you lose your local copies, the ebuild will still be available
from Gentoo's viewCVS for some time, where it can be retrieved from the
attic.

All that said, I too use xmms as I've yet to find anything else as simple
and reliable that continues to "just work".  It's very possibly the only
thing I have merged here still using gtk1, but while that means getting
rid of it would mean I'd be able to unmerge gtk1, it also means there's
little else that could break it or that it could break, thru the common
gtk1 dependencies, now.  I'd very much like it to continue working for
years yet.

/That/ said, there remains the reality of a now unmaintained gtk1, making
it harder and harder for Gentoo to continue to support thru successive
toolchain update iterations.  If no one's willing to continue to maintain
xmms /and/ ultimately gtk1... it will of necessity eventually die.

When it dies in Gentoo, while users can maintain it in their overlays for
months, the clock is seriously ticking, as more and more incompatibilities
between it and a kept-current system pile up.

... Personally, I'm hoping xmms will remain at least until KDE4 comes
around, with hopefully something there more workable than the KDE3 and
other solutions I've tried -- but kept returning to xmms, because it "just
worked", and didn't require undue resources to do it.  Getting arts out of
the way as the main KDE audio framework will be a big part of that.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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