[gnome-applet-music] Mark as retired (due to lack of further upstream development).

[Peter Gordon]

commit 4eb4b8e1769cab4b418642616d8ec2eca3390df9
Author: Peter Gordon <peter at thecodergeek.com>
Date:   Tue May 31 19:49:09 2011 -0700

    Mark as retired (due to lack of further upstream development).

 dead.package |   53 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-
 1 files changed, 52 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)
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diff --git a/dead.package b/dead.package
index f2396d2..8d9159b 100644
--- a/dead.package
+++ b/dead.package
@@ -1 +1,52 @@
-Package is retired
\ No newline at end of file
+The GNOME Music Applet was in September of 2009 superceded by Panflute. Its
+maintainer, Paul Kuliniewicz, has since March 2011 ceased development for
+various reasons, outline in his announcement posted on LaunchPad at
+<https://launchpad.net/panflute/+announcement/7933>, copied below for
+posterity.
+
+
+"The Future of Panflute Development," by Paul Kuliniewicz (2011-03-11)
+
+As probably surprises nobody paying attention to my (lack of) recent activity
+with it, I don’t have any plans to continue actively developing Panflute.
+
+For starters, I’m doubtful whether there’s going to be much of a need for
+Panflute or something like it in the future. Panflute basically serves two
+functions: abstracting various music players’ RPC interfaces behind a common
+MPRIS-based front-end, and allowing said player to be controlled within a
+GNOME panel via an applet.
+
+For the first, a lot of the music players out there in the Linux world today
+use MPRIS as their RPC interface, so there’s little need to stick another
+process in front of it with little to do other than serve as a pass-through
+proxy. Furthermore, recent versions of Rhythmbox and Banshee, two of the
+players with the largest user bases, have added MPRIS v2 interfaces in addition
+to (and eventually replacing, presumably) their original custom RPC interface.
+Today, a developer can support most of the players out there by writing a
+client that speaks MPRIS and MPRIS v2, which isn’t an unreasonable amount of
+work. Yes, there are a few players that still use a custom RPC interface, but
+development efforts would probably be better spent adding MPRIS support to them
+instead of using a separate application like Panflute as a translation layer.
+
+For the second, the GNOME panel will no longer exist once GNOME 3.0 is released,
+which uses a different graphical shell, pretty much eliminating the use case
+for Panflute’s panel applet entirely. Similarly, upcoming versions of Ubuntu
+replace the primary GNOME interface with Unity, also eliminating the panel
+where applets would live. Even using the GNOME 2 interface instead of Unity,
+Ubuntu provides a notification area icon that basically acts as an MPRIS client
+itself, so there’s not much need to use Panflute in addition to that.
+
+Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I’d simply prefer to spend my copious
+free time on things other than Panflute development. My motivation for working
+on Panflute has been rather low for a while, and after considering the (lack
+of) continuing need for it, it’s sunk even lower, to the point where I really
+don’t see myself doing much else with it.
+
+That’s not to say the project is necessarily dead, per se, if someone were to
+step up and effectively take over maintenance and development. There’s no
+candidates for that at the moment, though; Panflute has for the most part been
+a one-man show. If someone were to volunteer, I’d need to see some
+contributions made through patches and bug management before I felt comfortable
+handing control over. That’s assuming someone didn’t just decide to fork the
+project and go off on their own, which I’d also be OK with, not that my
+permission would be needed for that anyway.