First ever Exaile bugday

Some of you might remember that the Xubuntu Team is rethinking the default applications for Karmic. Steve, one of our developer community members has put a remarkable amount of work to determine the best but still quite lightweight music player for Karmic. At the moment it looks like Exaile is going to be our choice and Steve is already working on it.

As we want to deliver the best possible media player to you with as little bugs as possible, we are very happy to tell you that the Exaile development team announced their very first bugday (see the original announcement from the lead developers blog). If you know any Python and are willing to lend a hand, join them in fixing as many bugs as you can! More information on this event (and the future ones) can be found on the exaile-bugday team Launchpad page.

You are free to join the bugday at #exaile on Freenode even if you can’t fix any bugs. Have fun!

Discussion

Bjørn Sivertsen
July 25, 2009

Very interesting, but isn’t Exaile 100% heavier than RM and around 50% than Banshee?
Pasi Lallinaho
July 25, 2009

Hi Bjørn,

see this page for the test results Steve has gathered. Exaile actually does quite well, especially comparing to our current media player, Listen.

Even Exaile was a bit heavier, it wouldn’t mean it’s a bad choice. Firefox isn’t as lightweight as Midori or Epiphany, for example, but still it’s been a good choice for the default web browser. Xubuntu is not all about lightweightness (even it’s a big part of it), but also userfriendliness and a solid desktop experience.

Feel free to throw in any ideas – all of them will be considered.
Steve Dodier
July 25, 2009

Hey Bjørn,

My tests (on a 9.04 64bits machine without swap) led me to the conclusions in the test:

RB is always lighter, Banshee is lighter if you don’t take the shared libs into account, but they all end up having bigger memory leaks than Exaile.

Also, RB’s Jamendo catalogue makes it climb to 700MB RAM. A good part of our users don’t even have 512, so that’s a total no-go for me.
Jimmy (pak33m)
July 25, 2009

I just wanted to say that I’m pleased as punch at this news! I’ve been following all of the great changes in Xubuntu and this one certainly takes it all. And not just because I’m an Exaile fanboy either but I do believe that Exaile is a perfect fit for Xubuntu.

Alot of work needs to be done in Exaile still. I’ve asked a few others on the Ubuntu Florida LoCo team to work on Exaile bugs with me during the the rest of the Karmic cycle and even have our own Exaile bug days. We’re going to get started this weekend as a matter of fact.

Good on you for this :)

Jimmy (pak33m)
Pasi Lallinaho
July 25, 2009

Hi Jimmy,

great to hear you are working on Exaile as well. Be sure not to miss the official bugday – and bring all your buddies as well! :)
Steve Dodier
July 25, 2009

Hey Jimmy,

If you wanna help us to make Exaile rock even more, try to be here Tuesday. If you can find some python hackers with free time Tuesday, let us know and get them to look at the source ;)

It's free.

An everlasting journey to seek and find freedom.

First ever Exaile bugday