[rrambo]

First of all, I'd like to say thanks to the devs for all their hard work. XBMC is by far the best out there in media center software. I, like most got my first taste of it on an xbox and then started trying it out on linux not long after the source was available.

I've tried just about every htpc software out there for linux and have a lot of experience with all the linux media center contenders. I stopped using xbmc/linux about 6 months ago to try something new.. Mainly because I was getting really high cpu usage, and partly because I'm notorious for trying out new and different software.

Well, I had my fill of the other media center software I was trying and decided to see what progress had been made with xbmc because I was really missing it... To my surprise, the current state of xbmc/linux is quite polished... Looking at what has been accomplished and what remains to be worked on, I can see why it's not yet available for release. But for my purposes, playing music and movies from my nas, it's completely stable, functional and damn near perfect.

I did change to the xtv skin and added the Apple Movie Trailers script and both of those work perfectly. I've watched numerous movies without a hitch and my cpu usage is low, completely normal.

My hardware is not great, but fully capable of playing up to 720p content encoded x264. I'm running 1920x1080 resolution and the UI is beautiful. So in a nutshell, even though it's still in alpha stage, for my purposes it is completely stable, functional and worthy of release status.

[rodalpho]

Basic functionality is there and working pretty great, but the interface is still unpolished with overlapping entries in system info, still refers to the xbox in multiple spots, still has listings for game saves, the main menu programs entry is entirely useless, several options for video lock up the program, etc. It's definitely not release candidate quality but it could be packaged up and released as beta.

[Gamester17]

...I can see why it's not yet available for release....

...in a nutshell, even though it's still in alpha stage, for my purposes it is completely stable, functional and worthy of release status.

We want to have a PPA (Personal Package Archive, an apt-get Debian package compatible with Ubuntu) ready before we change the status of XBMC for Linux to "Alpha", and ther simple reason that it is no such PPA package yet is that our developers have not yet have time do begun work on it, ...only thing we done so far is registered a project for XBMC on launchpad.net
https://launchpad.net/xbmc

Patches are welcomed to speed up this process
http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=HOW-TO_submit_a_patch

[rodalpho]

Creating packages is not very difficult with debhelper; what are you looking for here? Prebuilt control and rules files, even though debhelper builds them for you?

[spiff]

we're looking for somebody with the knowledge to help us out so we dont have to use development time to read up on such things

[rodalpho]

I'd be happy to help out. Do you want to just publish today's daily as xbmc3.0b1 or would you rather pull a branch off the trunk and test it for awhile first?

[spiff]

i'd suggest the latter, to make sure there's no show stoppers around.

also, please dont refer to it as trunk - might confuse users. trunk is the xbox build

finally, version will be 2.1

[rodalpho]

OK, pull a twig off the branch then!

Then I suggest you or gamester or whoever make a sticky post designating that build as 2.1 beta1 RC1 and asking people to test it for a week or two; if it clears let me know and I'll package it up with proper dependencies, etc for the project owner to upload to launchpad.

[Gamester17]

Not 2.1 beta1 RC1 (as its alpha not beta and "RC" stands for Release Candidate which comes after beta)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_stage
It should be called XBMC for Linux 2.1 alpha 1 (at least I think so? )

[spiff]

it's definitely still alpha. it will reach beta once ALL features from the xbox (relevant) are done.
this includes a functional programs for instance

[rodalpho]

Well the idea was that it was the first release candidate for the first beta; if we found problems with that build and had to test another one it would be 2.1b1rc2. Or 2.1a1rc2 if you prefer.

IMO calling it beta is better than alpha even though it's not fully feature complete as more endusers are willing to try betas than alphas and the base functionality does work pretty damn well.

[Gamester17]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_stage
You can not name an alpha or a beta "RC", that is contradicting and would be confusing for those who understand the terminology (see the link above), and I agree with spiff that is is not a beta, ...normally you do a feature freeze during the beta stage (again, see the wikipedia article linked above) and we are not doing a feature freeze any time soon.

XBMC for Linux 2.1 alpha 1 (or "xbmc2.1-alpha1" as a package name) it will be

[Noodle]

What's the layout of this package? Like: comment configuration goto /etc, program itself goto /usr/bin, develop libraries? include heder files? userdata to $HOME/.xbmc? How about extra plugins? Fonts? and so on? Any plan? If we have all these defined, probably we can have a package for other Linux as well.

[rodalpho]

Mozilla had multiple release candidates for each firefox 3 beta; it's not unheard-of. But sure whatever you guys want.

XBMC doesn't support that stuff, all the file locations are pretty much hard-mapped. Using ~/.xbmc for UserData would be particularly welcome. I guess we could use softlinks to put them in different directories but I had planned to just drop it in "/opt/XBMC".

[spiff]

using ~/.xbmc for a profile is trivial, needs a code change, sure, but its just changing one location