Ubuntu, Banshee, and default applications

There have been rumblings for a few weeks now about the fate of the Banshee music player in the Ubuntu default install. The distribution switched from GNOME's default Rhythmbox music player to Banshee for the 11.04 release, but started discussing switching back for 12.04 LTS at the recent Ubuntu Developer Summit—to the surprise of the Banshee team. While the reasons for the switch are largely technical, though there is some dispute about their validity, there is a fair amount of unhappiness about the decision, not only for the switch itself but for the way the decision was made. In any case, the distribution will be switching back to Rhythmbox for 12.04.

One of the biggest complaints is that the Banshee team had no warning that Ubuntu was even considering the switch. As Jo Shields put it in a blog post: "If Banshee was being considered for replacement due to unresolved technical issues, then perhaps it would have been polite to, I don't know, inform upstream that it was on the cards?" He also notes that this is not the first time a project has been blindsided by a UDS discussion to remove a package from the default install. The PiTiVi video editor project had a similar experience back in May with regards to removing that package for 11.10.

After the UDS meeting, Canonical's Ubuntu desktop manager Jason Warner posted a note to the ubuntu-desktop mailing list looking for "further feedback". He outlined some of the problems with Banshee that were brought up at UDS, including its stability, start-up time, resource usage, and the project's responsiveness to Ubuntu-specific concerns.

Ubuntu Banshee maintainer Chow Loong Jin posted a response that addressed each of those concerns, but seemed most puzzled by the lack of responsiveness complaint: "If there were patches that Canonical/Ubuntu wanted in, why haven't I heard about them?". Martin Pitt concurred that Chow and Banshee have been responsive, but he added another handful of concerns about the program, including GTK3 support, the amount of space required to ship Banshee (30M, which includes Mono), ARM support, and a "fuzzy" future for Mono.

Once again, Chow stepped in to address some of those complaints. In particular, there seems to be a disconnect regarding ARM support. Chow points to one bug that has been filed, which is being worked on, and is unaware of other problems. But, based on information from Tobin Davis and Oliver Grawert of the Ubuntu ARM team, there have been numerous problems supporting Mono and Banshee on ARM. Those problems have evidently taken a large portion of the ARM team's time to try to resolve. That, coupled with a perception that Mono is becoming less popular as a platform, has even led to consideration of dropping Mono from the packages that will be officially supported for the LTS as Sebastien Bacher mentions:

The technical complaints seem reasonable, though it appears that some of the stability, resource usage, and start-up time issues are debatable, with some having lots of those kinds of problems and others not seeing them at all. But the bigger question is why the project wasn't really notified that there were big enough problems to consider removing Banshee as a default application until after it had been proposed, and mostly agreed upon, at UDS. One of the Ubuntu Mono packagers, Iain Lane, was actually present at the UDS, but was evidently never notified that Banshee's removal was under discussion. As Lane put it :

Lane is reacting to Warner's pronouncement, two weeks after bringing the subject up, that "it is clear the right decision for 12.04 is to make Rhythmbox the default music player". That message, in effect, brings the discussion to a close and makes the switch back to Rhythmbox. Lane and others felt that it was far from "clear" that the switch should be made. Warner clarified that he meant "clear to me", and went on to specify the reasons behind his decision. Most of it comes down to stability:

For his part, though, Lane also notes the PiTiVi situation as an earlier example, and details the problems he sees in the process:

Bacher acknowledges some of Lane's complaints, saying that the "topic has been handled in a pretty suboptimal way". He also agreed that the PiTiVi situation was similar and that the distribution could have done a better job keeping that project in the loop. But he is leery of Lane's "cudgel" characterization:

There's also the question of the importance of being in the default install. Even if Mono were to be removed from the packages supported for the five-year LTS period, both it and Banshee (Tomboy, F-Spot, ...) will still be available, but may be less prominent. As Lane pointed out, there are both good and bad points to being in the default install, but it's clear that projects which get removed feel it to be something of a slap in the face. But, as Jono Bacon points out, the way that Ubuntu users discover new software is changing:

The Ubuntu Software Center provides an AppStore-like interface for users to discover new software, so they are less likely to be bound only by what's available in the default install, according to Bacon. However, he does recognize the importance of the default applications and why projects are concerned when they get dropped:

In the end analysis, it would seem that Ubuntu could do a much better job working with the upstream projects that it is shipping in its default installation. It is mostly just a matter of communication, and this incident (and that PiTiVi situation before it) have raised the visibility of this type of problem. Rather than waiting until (nearly) the last minute, involving the upstream projects as well as the Debian/Ubuntu package maintainers early in the decision-making process is likely to cause a lot less stress and unhappiness. Projects that know about problems that may lead to their eventual removal from the default package set are pretty likely to address them—giving them enough time to do so before suddenly tossing them out can only help with that.