Guayadeque
Let’s face it. Life happens.
I have tried quite a few music organizer/players over the years. I have tried not to be fussy. Each one, for what ever reason, was not able to fulfill my needs.
Then I stumbled on Guayadeque. Winner!
I had traded emails with the maintainer, anonbeat, a few times in the past, but lately he doesn’t seem to be responding. The sourceforge site showed a few bugs reported but not triaged on top of items awaiting moderation for quite some time. Sadly, the last available release download is from February, 2014. The last update to the SVN repository was January, 2015. What was available for download in the Arch Linux repository had a bug where it would crash on stop/pause.
I struggled to find a replacement music player/organizer again that fit my needs…fail.
Maybe life intervened and anonbeat no longer has the time or resources for the project. Personally, I hope everything is well with him. But I could not let this code die, especially when it did what I wanted and there was not a suitable replacement.
The nice thing about open source is that the code is there to review - including how a distribution installs it. And that’s when a few idea’s about how to fix this problem clicked into place for me. I was able to figure out how to build Guayadeque from what the last maintainer (before I stuck my nose into things) had coded into the PKGBUILD file (Arch package build instructions). There was the secret sauce/command line I needed to get going. And we’re off…
The next stop for me was pulling in the details from Fedora and Debian for their Guayadeque packaging. Fedora had the stop/pause crash fix. Debian had a patch to update wxWidgets code to the wx3 series (latest available and in development).
After a few conversations with an Arch maintainer, I suddenly found myself with an
AUR package for Guayadeque with a host of patches. The Arch
maintainer for Guayadeque then stepped back from supporting the community
package. My AUR package became the only available to install Guayadeque.
Hmmm. So, if I want this code to survive, maybe I could do something about it.
From the things I have read on user forums, I think I’m not alone in wanting to see
this project to survive.
There is an old aphorism about everyone expecting someone to do the work and nobody did. After digging through the source a bit, I can see that this code just needs a little attention and care. Nothing outrageous. However, I am hesitant of forking a project just because.
With that in mind - enter musicqueue.
I will respect the original work from anonbeat. I hope he’s okay…
I already have a laundry list of TODO’s - the code must go on.
UPDATE:(2016Jun03) Guayadeque has moved to github. See musicqueue termination for more information.