I have to agree with Orionsune. I have been using LMCE for a couple of months now and mostly lurking on the forums in the little free time i have, trying to learn as i go. During that time I have to say i have come across more that enough negativitly, hostility and plain rudeness directed at different individuals to make me personally question how this project is being run and where its going.
The negativity is unfortunate. We need to work on that. The same problem plagued MythTV when that project was young. We have for the most part addressed the problem there. But it was something that took time, we needed to set make an effort to be civil and enforce the edict, "if you don't have anything good to say in response to a question, say nothing at all."
I get the impression of a clique running things that doesn’t take too well to criticism and has no real vision for the product besides their own narrow interests. I can understand that during product development we all like to add the things we think are cool but if you want to make a product a success you have to think what does the typical user want and i dont really think too much consideration is given to this.
Look I have a hard skin to people calling me "douche pickle" and other unmentionable criticism. But this is a hard skin formed by many years in the OSS community as a contributor. We are a young project, with a number people who are new to OSS contributing. It can be a shock the first time you've poured your heart out spending nights away from your family to contribute something to the world at large only to be greeted with death threats in private and insults in public. As the project matures there will be mentors for the new recruits who will help them make the adjustment.
As cool as some things might be such as the Mame wrapper, the mobile java client, has anyone given any thought to making this product compete as a media center first, its name is LinuxMediaCenter after all.
Yes very much so, but you also need to realize that unpaid volunteers will have their pet projects. They are in fact a very good way to get people involved and learn the API's that they need to understand in order to make the mundane improvements needed. They also help the developer blow off steam. This is important when you are dealing with people who work as professional programmers by day, an OSS project needs to balance the "Fun" aspects that keep developers involved and the "Work" aspects that keep the project going.
1. Lack of a photo slideshow facility
Interesting, we could just install the MythGallery plug-in by default and point it to the LMCE photo directories. If you can document what is needed to do this in the wiki, I can create the package fairly easily. I really never thought of this, I've never actually sat down and showed my family a slide-show.
2. Weak Media Structure
I don't really understand this, you are aware of tags right?
While all the extras that come with lmce such as the lighting controls, the orbiters etc are fantastic these two things are glaring omissions and present major barriers to the product entering the mainstream and competing for the media center space within any typical family environment considering their options. Put on top of this the less than amicable nature of some individuals on these forums, the lack of any perceived steering group and weak documentation and I wouldn’t count on lmce being here in 24 months time. I think that would be unfortunate as it has great potential, i personally now have a working setup with 3 MDs around the house and starting to look at lighting controls and security cameras. But still as a media center i cant make it do the all of basic things that XMBC could do, or my 360 acting as extenders.
I'm certain LinuxMCE will be here in 24 months time.
I also have to point out that the find by Orionsune in regards to MythTV hanging all the time due to what we now know was logging issues should be seen reflected upon by those in charge of this product. I mean the amount of posts highlighting this and similar problems that went ignored demonstrates something is wrong here.
Heh, the bug that Orionsume found had only been manifest for a few days when you found it. I've made about a dozen stability fixes to MythTV in the last few months, including the major one that made LMCE's MythTV less stable than other distro's using MythTV. The "-v all" for MythTV debugging only became crashing after I removed a patch from the earlier MythTV packages that completely disabled MythTV logging. I had removed this because the problems with installing MythTV on MD's were not possible to debug with debugging disabled for the backend. The excessive frontend logging was not apparent to me because I was looking at the backend log for the MD problem, and because my computer had no problem handling the excessive logging. Once Orionsume found the bug, I had committed the fix within a few days. That is how things are supposed to work. Orionsume like all of us is supposed to find and if possible find a fix for the bugs he sees. This is why betas are released, so we can all find and fix bugs, not just some clique of developers up in the sky somewhere.
I really dont mean to over criticise but something really doest seem right with how the product is managed. And i do appreciate the work that has gone into making this product what it is but still some things do need to be said. I hope they can be taken as constructive as that is my intent but i suspect some may view them in a different light.
Thanks Andy, I totally understand your concerns (well except for the media organization stuff), I wish I had more time and we had more contributors to address them my own countless concerns with LinuxMCE.
And on that note, I would love it if you could volunteer to work on something.
I like your slide show idea, perhaps you can investigate MythTV and other slideshow programs for Kubuntu and write up a report in the wiki? If you would like I can also walk you through the steps needed to implement your ideas in something that will be installed by default and automatically configured by LinuxMCE, or that scares you, you can wait for me to take your wiki and express it in packaging scripts.
