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Maniphest T12368

Evaulate elisa to replace cantata in Focal 20.04
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Description

Elisa player is now in the archive, and part of the apps release-service, so we should evaluate if this can replace cantata for 20.04.

Cantata depends on mpd, and can be a little confusing for new users because of that.

Elisa is:

  • designed to be simple, but it is now picking up new features such as radio stream support in 19.12.
  • scheduled to get bugfixes regularly now, while cantata release/fixes are at the discretion of its github maintainer.
  • going to have new feature releases from KDE that we can include in backports

Main things to consider IMO would be:

  • Features gained/lost
  • Reliability e.g. crashes visible bugs.
  • Music indexing. Elisa uses baloo, then falls back to its internal indexing of whatever music path you give it if baloo is not available. We disable by default the baloo content indexer, which in a quick test seems to result in Elisa having to go to fallback.

Please test elisa to see what you make of this idea.

I will make elisa 19.12 available in backports ppa for Eoan shortly, in case you cannot test in Focal.

rikmills created this task.Dec 15 2019, 9:30 AM
rikmills updated the task description. (Show Details)
ngraham added a subscriber: ngraham.Dec 15 2019, 9:36 AM

+1, I think this is a good choice.

valorie added a subscriber: valorie.Dec 17 2019, 2:38 AM

I notice that we don't build vvave. I do abhor the name, but it has been released, it is KDE software, and some people like it. Building and getting it into our repos would make it easier to test.

https://vvave.kde.org/

trmdi added a subscriber: trmdi.Dec 17 2019, 2:58 AM

Good choice. FWIW, the dev of Cantata said that he no longer uses it, the maintenance is now very limited.

rikmills added a comment.Dec 19 2019, 5:06 PM
In T12368#214063, @valorie wrote:

I notice that we don't build vvave. I do abhor the name, but it has been released, it is KDE software, and some people like it. Building and getting it into our repos would make it easier to test.

https://vvave.kde.org/

Requires mauikit framework (not a KF5) that we or debian also don't have. I might try to get KCI building it, but at the moment this is experimental at best.

rikmills added a comment.Dec 19 2019, 5:08 PM

I am minded to just go and do this, so at the very least if there are issues we have plenty of time to revert the change. Plus, real testing on more than just 1 or 2 test cases probably needs it going in the daily image?

Opinions......

ognarb added a subscriber: ognarb.Dec 19 2019, 6:00 PM

Mauikit doesn't have a stable api yet and there wasn't any release of vvave yet.

rikmills added a comment.Dec 19 2019, 6:05 PM

I was still thinking of 'babe'!

ngraham added a comment.Dec 19 2019, 11:26 PM

FWIW I'm using Elisa full time now so I would not call it experimental or unstable. It is still missing a few features I'd like and can always use more polish of course, but it's actively developed, and I think it's a pretty safe choice.

niccolove added a subscriber: niccolove.Dec 20 2019, 9:51 AM

+1, this is quite in line with the consistency goal

rikmills moved this task from Backlog to Ready 4 Work on the Kubuntu board.Dec 24 2019, 2:27 PM
rikmills added a comment.Dec 24 2019, 2:29 PM

Ok. The daily ISO build tomorrow morning (~6 AM UTC) will contain elisa as the default music player. Lets see how that goes with testers.

Happy Xmas!

ngraham added a comment.Dec 24 2019, 3:07 PM

Awesome! Same to you!

rikmills added a comment.Jan 2 2020, 9:14 AM

I have uploaded a stable branch git snapshot to Focal. tar was created with releaseme, so should be as complete with translations etc as one created by the KDE release process.

19.12.1 with these changes is due out in 7 days time, but some advance testing does no harm. There are many baloo and native indexing fixes in this!