Hi friends
Linus and I have come to the conclusion that the time has come to pull out
Archos Player support from the main Rockbox sources.
Removing this from the sources will of course not remove the existing download
packages or whatever we have today that works fine for the Player. It will
just make development from now on very restricted for that device.
Reasons for doing this:
o The Archos Players are very limited HW-wise and hardly anything added to
Rockbox these days benefit Player owners. So there's not much of a point
for Player owners to keep up with and use the latest. Most Player owners
simply use one of the older releases and are fine with that.
o Hardly any devs have Players these days or at least hardly ever use them.
There's even hardly any users tracking the bleeding edge and thus we
often don't even notice when we break functionality!
o The Archos Player's very limited LCD and buttons are a burden in lots of
GUI-oriented code. Ripping out the need for support charcells will
simplify lots of code.
How We Propose to Proceed
o We set a CVS tag and create a CVS branch of the current code, the last
combined Rockbox version with support for Archos Player. The name of the
branch will be 'player'.
o In the CVS HEAD (main development branch) we rip out Archos Player
specific code, we stop doing daily builds etc covering the device.
o We call out and urge a "Rockbox Archos Player Maintainer" to step forward
to nurse the Rockbox player branch (as important bug fixes etc could
go in) but perhaps most importantly to make a last full release of
Rockbox for the Archos Player, including docs, voice files etc.
