[64studio-devel] Upgrades: GIMP & GCC

[tim hall]

Hi all,

I'd just like to confirm that the recent GIMP upgrade currently breaks 
gnome-core on my machine. This is not good.

I also feel it might be worth mentioning that it looks like Debian are 
pushing the gcc-4.3 transition through now. I know that there are a 
couple of important multimedia apps that appear to be having trouble 
with the transition like openmovieeditor, audacity also appears to have 
some lively bugs. Rosegarden and Ardour seem to be making it through the 
pass thanks to the persistence of their maintainers.

This process is only relevant to these packages being able to migrate to 
Debian testing (lenny/sid) as Free already has measures in place to get 
reasonably up-to-date versions of these multimedia apps into 64 Studio.

My concern is that some of the Desktop apps with multimedia functions 
are becoming out-of-date. I can't get support from lastfm, because I'm 
using the deprecated version of their player, for instance, and the 
handling of video within firefox is embarrassing. Everybody using Linux 
appears to download and use a standalone player. That's great so long as 
you don't want to try and do web-based video conferencing and 
synchronise it with other web-based media. This particular trick 
requires the latest versions of flash, realplayer, quicktime or windows 
media. Whilst we can't be expected to support the latter options, it 
would be really good to have multimedia support for web browsing that is 
known to work. I'm afraid that ogg might as well be a proprietary Linux 
format as far as most cross-platform developers are concerned. I know it 
rocks, you know it rocks, but how do we convince them to roll with it? 
I'm talking about Linux-sympathetic developers here too.

I know this stuff isn't the meat (i.e. pro-audio) of 64 Studio, but it 
is the candy, which potential migrators will look for. If they can't 
watch videos on youtube with the sound in sinc, they will assume that 
everything else is crap too. 'Scuse my bluntness.

 From a user/testers perspective I think it would be great if 64 Studio 
testing tracked Debian testing all the time. I can just picture Free 
holding his head in his hands as I type that. ;) It's got to be better 
than backporting GNOME in order to include the latest GIMP? No?

Just today's thoughts, really.

cheers,

tim