[Willynux]

I'm a bit confused by what I've read here in the forums.

Sometimes I read that Ngale is a fork, intended to take Sb back to linux and improve it. ...That, at some point, NG and SB won't be compatible anymore and each one will take it's own path.

Sometimes I read that Ngale is only a port of Sb to Linux and nothing more. That there is not enough infrastructure for a stand alone project and that bugs and feature requests should be rather addressed to Sb.

Is there a definitive answer? Did I just misunderstood some posts?

[ilikenwf]

A fork, in that we're improving it (primarily for Linux), but we're also trying to share the patches with Songbird...the compatibility will break once we upgrade to a new xul, as so far Songbird hasn't really been all that accepting of our contributions. Note that our codebase is vastly different in the master branch. While it doesn't build, the code in that branch is "in progress," working towards using new xulrunners. We have to get the conversion 100% done before it will build completely.

We are nowhere near being a port - ports imply moving from one architecture or os to another. Songbird started on Linux as well as Mac and Windows. We have plenty of infrastructure to build upon.

It should be noted that Songbird hardly ever handles their bugs or feature requests anymore, and even then, they only pay attention to those for Windows and sometimes Mac, as they no longer support Linux. They care more about songbird.me and their android player, everything else takes a backseat to those.

We're in faster development, but a lot of what we're doing is under the hood right now, in preparation for using newer build dependencies, and to eventually turn Nightingale into a player that uses system libraries, having no external dependencies or anything bundled with it.

We're not funded, nor are we here to turn a profit, and this is something we work on outside of our jobs, so we can't exactly slave away on Nightingale every waking hour...we have jobs to deal with. That's the reason we're always looking for new devs to join, to spread the work out even more.

[rsjtdrjgfuzkfg]

(06-23-2012, 12:38 PM)Willynux Wrote: Sometimes I read that Ngale is only a port of Sb to Linux and nothing more. That there is not enough infrastructure for a stand alone project and that bugs and feature requests should be rather addressed to Sb.

I can't remember to see that in the forums. However, we currently track bugs that appear both in Nightingale and Songbird also in Songbird's bugzilla to have it more easy to submit our patches to them.

[Willynux]

Thank you for your replies, that answered my question! And it's great to hear it!

I'll take a look at the wiki again carefully to see how I can contribute but I'm not so good at coding. Since I'd really like Nightingale to thrive I'm wondering if having some financial support might help. I've read the thread about having google music on board and it made me wonder. Maybe having some discreet ads on the site won't bother anyone and will help pay the hosting costs. I'm sure that having a donation button could also be good for gathering some resources from people that cannot develop. I'd certainly donate. I don't want to spoil the spirit of passionate development by putting money into the equation, it's up to you guys. I don't think it will be a lot of money initially anyway but maybe enough to make a difference. Eventually to hire a developer from time to time to do the things that nobody wants to do(?). Linux Mint does that (ads and donations) and it seems like a reasonable thing to do.

Well, that's just my 2 cents