From: Daniel Stenberg <daniel_at_rockbox.org>
Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2006 16:05:27 +0200 (CEST)

Hi friends

Linus and I have come to the conclusion that the time has come to pull out
Archos Player support from the main Rockbox sources.

Removing this from the sources will of course not remove the existing download
packages or whatever we have today that works fine for the Player. It will
just make development from now on very restricted for that device.

Reasons for doing this:

o The Archos Players are very limited HW-wise and hardly anything added to
   Rockbox these days benefit Player owners. So there's not much of a point
   for Player owners to keep up with and use the latest. Most Player owners
   simply use one of the older releases and are fine with that.

o Hardly any devs have Players these days or at least hardly ever use them.
   There's even hardly any users tracking the bleeding edge and thus we
   often don't even notice when we break functionality!

o The Archos Player's very limited LCD and buttons are a burden in lots of
   GUI-oriented code. Ripping out the need for support charcells will
   simplify lots of code.

How We Propose to Proceed

o We set a CVS tag and create a CVS branch of the current code, the last
   combined Rockbox version with support for Archos Player. The name of the
   branch will be 'player'.

o In the CVS HEAD (main development branch) we rip out Archos Player
   specific code, we stop doing daily builds etc covering the device.

o We call out and urge a "Rockbox Archos Player Maintainer" to step forward
   to nurse the Rockbox player branch (as important bug fixes etc could
   go in) but perhaps most importantly to make a last full release of
   Rockbox for the Archos Player, including docs, voice files etc.
Received on 2006-08-21