Hi folks, Sonata's not dead yet and a few courageous people are still hacking a bit on it. It's my pleasure to announce a new pre-release of Sonata 1.7a1: as the version number indicates, this is still an alpha, for those brave enough to give it a try!
Due to the numerous cleaning and refactoring to improve the readibility and simplify Sonata, this is mostly a developer release, but feel free to try it out nevertheless! Grab it while it's fresh at https://github.com/multani/sonata/ So, what do we have here? >From Python 2/GTK 2 to Python 3/GTK 3 ------------------------------------- The major change is definitively the port to Python 3 and Gtk 3: this is a great news for developers since this is a quite hard work to drop soon to-be-dead technologies but is has to be done one day, and they can now profit from a cleaner base. Python 2 is going to be phased out soon (some distributions already plan to ship only Python 3), Gtk 2 is is not going to receive anymore improvement in the future, as well as the Python binding to Gtk 2. As a consequence, Sonata now depends on PyGObject instead of PyGTK. PyGObject is still in constant development, and Sonata already discover some bugs in the binding. As a consequence, it is recommended, although not mandatory, to use the latest version of PyGObject (3.7.4 and above are known to work quite well). Earlier versions, such as 3.4.x shipped in most distributions *should* work in most cases. For end users, it doesn't change lot of things though: dependencies have changed and they are probably still a few bugs hidden here and there due to the port... If you don't feel like a tester, I would recommend to stay with Sonata 1.6.x, but bug reports are more than welcome! Those changes themselves are enough to justify a new release, but there are a few things more! Other goodies ------------- Beside the Py3/Gtk3 port, this have been improved: * lyrics and covers should work again * better support for newer MPD releases * better support for fullscreen mode * slightly improved UI >From Sonata 1.6.x to Sonata 1.7a1 --------------------------------- Using the new version requires updating the list of depencendies: * you don't the following anymore: - Python 2 - PyGTK - python-eggtrayicon * .. but you will need the following: - Python 3 - PyGObject - python-mpd2 Things currently planned for Sonata 1.7 --------------------------------------- * Restore the tagging plugin (there's no release yet with Python 3 support, although upstream already integrated our fixes). * Replace the current notification system to use the desktop notifications instead. Hopefully, we'll still be able to propose the old system as an alternative. * startup performance improvements * a "favorites songs" system * probably other things, want to get involved? :) Where to I get this already? ---------------------------- The code can be find in the Git repository at https://github.com/multani/sonata or you can grab a tarball at the following address: https://github.com/multani/sonata/archive/v1.7a1.tar.gz Bugs should be preferably reported on Github at https://github.com/multani/sonata/issues or here on the mailing-list. If you have patches which add new features, improve Sonata or fix bugs, you can submit them as pull requests on Github at https://github.com/multani/sonata/pulls or here on the mailing list. Final word ---------- Hopefully, this is going to shake Sonata a bit and revive this great player. Thanks for those who waited here, thanks for those who are going to try this new release, and special thanks to all the people who helped to make this new release out! Jonathan _______________________________________________ Sonata-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/sonata-users
