Thank you so much for the update (and for taking the time to read our comments.)

Regarding the Linux packaging problem, I posted a blog entry summarising the issue last year. Most (all?) of the salient points are still valid. It’s not as simple as “build a .deb and shove it into Ubuntu’s or Fedora’s repos”. I’m hopeful that some of Wladimir’s recent work on preparing to update us to XULRunner 1.9.2 will help alleviate the major issues there. And while we could build our own .rpm or .deb, it wouldn’t actually be utilising any system packages – so what’s the point? It’d just be putting distribution-specific lipstick on our .tgz pig. At least this way, the .tgz is universally usable on all Linux distributions.

With regards to the releases… yes, we’ve been woefully negligent in posting blog updates as to what release is happening when, sorry. We wanted to ship Jackson 5 (1.3), but it had fairly major MTP regressions while we were building out MSC support. Kanye (1.4) was looking fairly good, but when we were done with it we found a few bugs (library management being a notable one) that we wanted to hold it up for. We started a new minor release KoЯn (1.4.1) to address those, as well as to slip in a couple of new features (MSC playlist, and the new Purple Rain Feather). There are only a couple of us working on KoЯn; in the meantime the rest of the team is moving full speed ahead on Led Zeppelin (what is slated to be the 1.5 release), the notable new work being Video work.

I know in the past we’ve been fairly diligent about publicly shipping every new release (Cher, Dokken, Eno, Fugazi, Genesis, Hendrix, and Isan) – but with Jackson 5, Kanye, and in all likelihood Led Zeppelin as well, we’ve had fairly major new features (MSC, CD-Rip, and the currently-in-development Video) which is just simply too large of a scope to easily fit into one release. When we’re done with the release we assess whether this is something we want to ship publicly to our users.. and if not, we decide whether it makes sense to do a minor release (as we’re doing with KoЯn) or not (we opted not to for Jackson 5 since all the developers were already moving onto Kanye at that point).

Also, for anyone wishing to engage in some more real-time conversation with the devs – if you’re not familiar with IRC, feel free to use our IRC-in-a-webpage to drop by #songbird and chat.

In terms of unofficial packages, seen plenty which were TOTALLY broken. In fact, in the past, at least 1 package incorrectly linked to songbird-bin, instead of songbird to execute (an obvious mistake which proves it wasn’t tested at all). And there have been so many with weird issues which didn’t exist in the .tar.gz, which is why users are redirected to the .tar.gz (there is a good reason). Whilst unofficial packages are getting better and better, its hard for people offering support to know if the problem is caused by a bad package or not.

And linking to community supported packages is a BAD idea, security-wise. A trust based system is a poor system, and its what led to the prevalence of viruses on Windows.

I think if Ubuntu spent time trying to unify formats with Redhat and other vendors (even if done via packagekit), it would save thousands of developer hours worldwide, and open linux up to 3rd party developers more. And, it would save the distro’s plenty of time too, and speed up the development of linux itself.

Just my opinion though (not part of POTI).

I would also like to see a release. This will force add-on developers to update their extensions. I don’t care about MSC or MTP, but I’d like to see the other extensions updated. I can’t wait to get 1.5 final! The alpha is really nice, i hope the video window will be integrated somewhere in the interface