[Re: [icecast] icecast2 ??]

[Aaron Gaudio]

Behold, gtgbr at gmx.net hath decreed:
> Aaron Gaudio wrote:
> > or developing for it. The fact that no release packages are available
> > signifies to me that icecast2 is not yet ready for prime time. This
> 
> Well, there are, see Geoff's mail ... those are official. Multiple
> problems of pretty much any kind prevented Xiph.org from getting
> icecast.org in order; I don't know much about them, but the fact that
> icecast.org is *really* in bad shape, its CVS is outdated, no mention of
> Icecast2 as you said, like the missing Alpha release.. all this shows
> that there must be something majorly b0rk3n. ;P ... and there's only
> that much time they have to fix time intense things that have nothing to
> do with what they want/we expect them to do - develop.

If icecast.org is so broken, then someone ought to do what was
suggested on the list in November (looking through the archives):
put it out of its misery. Why are there no "official" releases?
Are you saying no one (say, an official maintainer, for which that
would be one of his/her functions) is willing to put them together
and stuff them somewhere on xiph.org or sourceforge.net or some other
distribution channel that is available and visible? Is there a 
maintainer for this project (I mean that seriously, I'm not really
familiar with the development effort)?

> 
> What I'm trying to say, those problems are webserver related. Icecast2
> alpha was finished already months ago, and even before that it's been in
> quite some wide production use already. Icecast2 is a stable program.
> The most prominent example would surely be the BBC Vorbis streams.

That may be, but if the only "official" source I have to retrieve it
from is CVS, then it is not ready for prime time, no matter what its
stability may or may not be. First of all, grabbing the latest CVS
version means I will be getting every little (untested) change that
has been put into CVS. If there are labels for "official" released
versions, then I don't know about them... why? because there's no
documentation of what to actually get from CVS.

Wine has CVS versions... one usually downloads a CVS snapshot (or
RPM made from a CVS snapshot)... wine was "stable" (if not "complete")
for quite a long time, but they never called it released until 1.0
came out.

> 
> If you're waiting for a 2.0 release (not alpha, not beta), well, your
> loss. Icecast2 worked great for my little fun games for something like
> 1.5 years now (no, I don't have a 100 MBit line at my disposal ;P).
> Apparently there are only a few minor features missing, and considering
> its stability I believe a potential beta phase wouldn't last long.

The problem is, without having enough people running it, such stories
are allegorical. And there cannot be many people running it, judging
from the lack of servers listed in the icecast.org directory server
(unless everyone just suddenly became shy).

> 
> > is not meant to be a criticism with anything about icecast2, as I
> > haven't used it, merely that it should not be treated as if it is
> > released until it is released, and icecast1 should not be treated as
> > obsolete until icecast2 is released. (BTW, I had this same argument
> 
> It *is* released, but people can't get it besides from Mike's inofficial
> place, Xiph.org CVS and Oddsock's win32 port on oddsock.org. That's the
> whole issue, not Icecast2 being not where I pretend it to be.

Then it is not released, just available. It's like saying "Doom 3 
*is* released, but people can't get it besides from the unofficial 
alpha available on Gnutella". Maybe it is just a maintenance problem-
maybe someone just needs to grab the icecast2 X.XX version label from
CVS, make a tarball and put it up on a website. That's still part of
releasing a project (free software or not), and without such maintenance
effort, the project will appear to most as not ready for use. Is this
a TODO item? Is there a "stable version" label on icecast2 (other than
HEAD)? I can try putting together a package in my spare time and
sticking it online somewhere.

> 
> I suggest you give it a try. Streaming Vorbis is fun. If you happen have
> tools like libtool, automake/-conf et al installed, getting it from CVS
> is really no big deal and no different than installing from a release
> tarball.

I'm not all that interested in streaming vorbis at this time, because
I have more mp3s than I do oggs. It's simpler for me to stream mp3s.
Does icecast2 only stream vorbis? If that's the case, then icecast1
will never be obsolete so long as people want to stream mp3s (without
reencoding to ogg-- which introduces more loss into the stream). From
my little understanding of what exactly icecast2 does (hobbled together
from searches through the list archives, since there is no useful
webpage information).

> 
> > Furthermore, since icecast2 is not released yet, IMO it is premature
> > to disable the icecast1-compatible directory server (especially
> > without any kind of warning). I will continue to use icecast1, for
> > all of its faults until icecast2 appears to be, if not a mature
> > project, then at least a project which has given birth. The fact that
> 
> Uh, does any directory server still work? The Shoutcast people didn't
> want Icecast servers announced in their directories anymore for quite
> some time now, iirc, and given the shape of icecast.org, every "normal"
> directory servers there might simply be broken over time. ;P

yp.mp3.de still works, although it does not display as much detail
on each stream as yp.icecast.org does (did). That, and I don't speak
German. :)


-- 

prothonotar at tarnation.dyndns.org
"Every man is a mob, a chain gang of idiots." 
                           - Jonathan Nolan, /Momento Mori/
  


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