I have a old Archos gmini 212 which on which rockbox was never ported.
This may seem off subject but my point is : I still use it and I guess I
may still use Archos Jukebox if I had one. It is/would be dedicated to
voice files or as a player I can/could leave in my car without thinking
I'd be sorry if it was stolen.
Now to the point : as it's been said these players are stable and won't
be improved so of course push them aside but not out. There are 2 kind
of players on rockbox.org : stable & unstable. I suggest to create a
third one = old unsupported ports which were stable... or not whenever
unstable does not mean unusable (as for my Cowon D2).
This may BE off topic in the development group, if so I apologize, only
trying to show the end-user point of view
Regards,
Steph.
Envoyé de mon aMac
Le 09/02/2014 13:37, Lorenzo Miori a écrit :
I already started having the same thoughts some weeks ago...
As you already mentioned we have new challenges (I would add native vs
hosted, touchscreen GUI etc)
Moreover I don't think that a 3.13 release for an archos is
"outdated", the main point is that the player is usable and new
releases won't improve that aspect at all.
Furthermore if any hacker is willing to resume the port in some other
ways, he is free to do so.
In conclusion yes, go ahead. I'm for a general code cleanup :)
Lorenzo
On 9 Feb 2014 13:08, "Frank Gevaerts" <fr...@gevaerts.be
<mailto:fr...@gevaerts.be>> wrote:
Hi all,
When rockbox started about twelve years ago, the Archos Jukebox was
still a shiny new device, only slightly outclassed by the Recorder
with
its wonderful bitmap display.
Rockbox pushed these devices far beyond what anyone could have
imagined
when they were released.
Rockbox now runs on many more devices than these old Archoses, and
with
each new device, new challenges and opportunities arose. We now
support
colour screens, CPU decoding, touchscreens, and many features that
were
inspired by new and more powerful hardware.
These newer devices are now vastly more popular than the Archoses, and
this combined with the Archoses being different in some important ways
(using a hardware codec, and for the Jukebox, using a character cell
display) has meant that during the last few years Rockbox for the
Archoses has not had the maintenance it really needs. This is e.g.
visible on the build page [1], where you can see that the build
for the
Archos Recorder has been broken for more than a year, due to it (and
soon, probably, some of its siblings) really needing to move to a
different way of booting (a move the non-Archos ports made back when
they started).
The work needed to keep the Archos port alive is not impossible,
but at
least for the past two years, nobody has stepped up. We don't even
know
if anyone still has one of these devices in active use.
I think it's now time to let the Archos port rest. Without it, rockbox
would not have existed, but the way we treat it currently is not
what it
deserves. We don't want people to Rockbox on the Archoses as an
annoyance that keeps breaking the build.
Let us try to remember Rockbox on the Archos in its glory days,
when it
showed the world what a digital audio player could really do.
I propose we let 3.13 be the last rockbox release that supports
the old
Archos devices, and that we won't try to force them into the 3.14
release again.
I also propose we stop auto-building the Archos ports right away, and
that we consider any HWCODEC or CHARCELL code to be available for
cleanup after 3.14 has been released (such cleanup can destabilise the
code, and we want 3.14 out soon)
Thoughts?
Frank
[1] http://build.rockbox.org/dev.cgi
--
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan
