Package: gnome Version: 1:47+4 Severity: important We should choose a music player, or possibly the absence of a music player, to be installed by default as part of the GNOME desktop task.
Various music players differ in their approach. Rhythmbox and GNOME Music are library/database-based music players, the design popularized by iTunes. Decibels is a simple file-based audio player, more like an audio equivalent of totem or eog, with no library/database functionality. Music players also differ in whether they can cope gracefully with untagged music files, or whether they rely on correct tagging. Historically we installed both rhythmbox and gnome-music, but I think that's clearly wrong (#969289, #1027995, #1079596): we should pull in at most one library/database-based music player. After merging https://salsa.debian.org/gnome-team/meta-gnome3/-/merge_requests/17, as it stands we'll only have gnome-music installed by default. Users are of course very welcome to install a different audio player, and there are plenty available from Debian or Flathub, both GNOME and not. I use mpd and various clients myself, and my partner prefers Rhythmbox, but I don't think either of those would be a good default! Some options are: * no music player in the default install at all - Ubuntu does this - I think this could be a good option - we could add a Suggests on something if we want to * only a simple file-based audio player - Fedora might do this, via Decibels (GNOME Circle) - we cannot do exactly that unless someone packages Decibels or similar - Decibels is not in Debian and likely to be hard to package (it's written in TypeScript) * gnome-music - status quo - GNOME Core app - popcon: 55K installs, 2K votes - strongly relies on correct tagging * rhythmbox - historical default - not particularly active maintenance any more - popcon: 62K installs, 3K votes * amberol - GNOME Circle app - popcon: tiny (it's new, only added to Debian in early 2024) * lollypop - Hosted on GNOME Gitlab, but not GNOME Circle - popcon: more than amberol but still < 1K (available since 2015, increased a lot in 2020) - strongly relies on correct tagging If we do choose to install something by default, it can either be Depends or Recommends. Given that we're seriously considering not having a dependency at all, I think Recommends would be better. I don't have a particularly strong opinion on this, but we do need some sort of decision. At the moment I think my vote would be: no default > gnome-music > rhythmbox > others but I'm happy to be overruled on that, as long as there has been some sort of choice and we're not just deciding based on inertia. For now, I'm going to reduce gnome-music to a Recommends to make it easily removable, and update https://salsa.debian.org/gnome-team/meta-gnome3/-/merge_requests/10 to reduce it further to a Suggests. smcv
