Volunteers and XMMS

Being in the sound herd (though not terribly active there as of late) I figured I would comment on the whole XMMS “debate” that seems to be taking up huge amounts of energy and time of one of our most talented and dedicated developers. It seems that the planned removal of XMMS has a lot of users upset. I can understand why they would be upset, though there is no reason they can’t continue to use it from an overlay or just make themselves a local overlay for it.

The point here is that currently there are bugs, and it is not working for some users, there are choices in the current situation. Either we can fix it, which will take an increasing amount of time and effort as time passes, have to explain over and over again in bugs that users file why it doesn’t work and will likely never work for them or we can remove the package. We have picked the latter choice as none of us has the time or interest to fix all the bugs, and continue fixing them as time passes. Don’t forget that Gentoo developers are volunteers, as such we are not obligated to work on any particular parts of Gentoo, we work on what we feel like working on. We also are not obligated to explain over and over again why something is broken (don’t forget the possible bad reputation we may garner by having known broken stuff in the tree).

To the users who like XMMS, please do not flame developers about the planned removal, this only has the effect of demotivating them, and make them less likely to want to work on anything at all. If you really want to keep using XMMS, simply copy all the ebuilds you want to use to a local overlay, and add them to /etc/portage/package.unmask. If you for some reason feel this is not good enough for you, and you absolutely need to have it in portage, you can either become a developer and maintain it yourself (and please actually fix the bugs, even if they don’t affect you personally), or you can pay a current developer to maintain it for you. As I have said before, we are not paid to work on Gentoo, so we are not under any obligation to maintain a package that none of us use or are interested in using.

Once again, please leave flameeyes and other sound devs alone, flaming us isn’t going to get us to keep XMMS in the tree. It’s only going to annoy us, take our time from working on other packages and possibly motivate developers to quit so they won’t have to deal with users demanding we cater to their every personal wish.