Re: DragonPlayer

[pointedstick]

 On Fri, 08 Dec 2017 13:04:12 -0800 Harald Sittersit...@kde.org 
wrote  
It's maintained just fine 
https://phabricator.kde.org/R259:b06cd9e1fbacefabdd2c0fa61f9af39cead25d8e. 
It's not getting better, it's not getting worse it's getting 
maintained at the level it is at. What Nate is asking for is an active 
developer... and that is an entirely different problem which speaks 
more to the community investment in our applications than anything 
else. 


Sorry Harald, I hope I haven't offended you! I want to be clear that I'm not 
trying to dump on DragonPlayer at all or call for its execution. Rather, I'd 
like to make the case that it doesn't serve our users to continue distributing 
software that's degrading over time due to bit rot--the fate of all software 
that's not receiving active development. Bug reports become a black hole of 
frustration for users ("Hello! Why isn't this fixed yet? Why hasn't anyone 
even looked at it!?") and become a source of overwhelm and depression for the 
developers ("Oh no, another bug that I don't have the time or energy to 
fix..."). If we aren't going to get rid of DragonPlayer, then we need to 
rehabilitate or rewrite it! Anything to inject some new energy into the system. 
For that matter the same is true of Baloo...



VLC is already a do-everything kitchen sink program, and yeah, with a Qt UI, 
it's right at home on Plasma, though of course some KDE contribution to further 
refine the UI would be great. DragonPlayer can't compete with it on the basis 
of features, so I think it does make sense to get back to basics and make it or 
its successor a really lightweight minimal program that only does one thing and 
does it well. We would need to aggressively resist feature creep, directing 
users to VLC or something else when they make requests for additional features.


If there's not enough support or development time for that, then we might 
indeed want to consider contributing more to VLC instead. Those contributions 
would have a huge impact, and there's certainly a lot to do! For example, in 
Plasma, VLC is still unable to play media on password-protected Samba shares 
without using the command line or resorting to entering the share's credentials 
in VLC's own config module: https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/18993


Nate

Re: DragonPlayer

[Harald Sitter]

It's maintained just fine
https://phabricator.kde.org/R259:b06cd9e1fbacefabdd2c0fa61f9af39cead25d8e.
It's not getting better, it's not getting worse it's getting
maintained at the level it is at. What Nate is asking for is an active
developer... and that is an entirely different problem which speaks
more to the community investment in our applications than anything
else.

>From where I am standing dragon's purity of purpose has been ripped
apart, put back together, than ripped apart again. Making it a
frankenmonster in so many ways that I would find it hard to imageine
anyone wanting to actually iterate on the current code instead of just
rewriting the entire damn thing to go back to the basics (being the
simplest UI possible for video) or making a competitive product to VLC
(and let's be honest why would anyone do that considering VLC's
default UI is Qt, so one might as well spend time on that).

As far as feature development is concerned it's a bit of a dead-end,
unless you are out for fights. You can neither take all advanced
features out lest you piss off people, nor can you graft more features
on and throw its entire selling point out the window making it yet
more complicated.

To that end if there is community support for killing dragon, I won't
stand in anyone's way.
KDE is already good friends with VideoLAN and I would only find it
fitting if we threw some of our experience in making GUIs behind VLC
to make it even better and let it shine in a plasma-desktop &
plasma-mobile context.

That being said though. If anyone wants to start from scratch with a
super simple video player UI to replace the current dragon they can
get in touch with me. Jens and I worked on a really kickass concept
already. There is value in the simple use case, it's just not going to
take over the world.

HS


On Fri, Dec 8, 2017 at 5:36 PM, Sebastian Kügler  wrote:
> On vrijdag 8 december 2017 15:25:06 CET Nate Graham wrote:
>> Sad to say, DragonPlayer seems dead-ish. It hasn't gotten any code
>> changes since January of this year. Kubuntu has stopped shipping it by
>> default, replacing it with VLC. Bugzilla tickets continue to pile up.
>>
>> What's the way forward here? Should we look for a new maintainer or
>> admit defeat and just recommend VLC or MPV or something else?
>
> Looking for a new maintainer sounds like the way to go.
>
> Cheers,
> --
> sebas
>
> http://www.kde.org | http://vizZzion.org
>
>

Re: DragonPlayer

[Sebastian Kügler]

On vrijdag 8 december 2017 15:25:06 CET Nate Graham wrote:
> Sad to say, DragonPlayer seems dead-ish. It hasn't gotten any code
> changes since January of this year. Kubuntu has stopped shipping it by
> default, replacing it with VLC. Bugzilla tickets continue to pile up.
> 
> What's the way forward here? Should we look for a new maintainer or
> admit defeat and just recommend VLC or MPV or something else?

Looking for a new maintainer sounds like the way to go.

Cheers,
-- 
sebas

http://www.kde.org | http://vizZzion.org