From: Steph.MMyahoo <Seumeumeuh_at_yahoo.co.uk>
Date: Tue, 11 Feb 2014 12:38:39 +0100

I have a old Archos gmini 212 which on which rockbox was never ported.
This may seem off subject but my point is : I still use it and I guess I
may still use Archos Jukebox if I had one. It is/would be dedicated to
voice files or as a player I can/could leave in my car without thinking
I'd be sorry if it was stolen.

Now to the point : as it's been said these players are stable and won't
be improved so of course push them aside but not out. There are 2 kind
of players on rockbox.org : stable & unstable. I suggest to create a
third one = old unsupported ports which were stable... or not whenever
unstable does not mean unusable (as for my Cowon D2).

This may BE off topic in the development group, if so I apologize, only
trying to show the end-user point of view

Regards,

Steph.

Envoyé de mon aMac

Le 09/02/2014 13:37, Lorenzo Miori a écrit :
>
> I already started having the same thoughts some weeks ago...
> As you already mentioned we have new challenges (I would add native vs
> hosted, touchscreen GUI etc)
> Moreover I don't think that a 3.13 release for an archos is
> "outdated", the main point is that the player is usable and new
> releases won't improve that aspect at all.
> Furthermore if any hacker is willing to resume the port in some other
> ways, he is free to do so.
> In conclusion yes, go ahead. I'm for a general code cleanup :)
>
> Lorenzo
>
> On 9 Feb 2014 13:08, "Frank Gevaerts" <frank_at_gevaerts.be
> <mailto:frank_at_gevaerts.be>> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> When rockbox started about twelve years ago, the Archos Jukebox was
> still a shiny new device, only slightly outclassed by the Recorder
> with
> its wonderful bitmap display.
>
> Rockbox pushed these devices far beyond what anyone could have
> imagined
> when they were released.
>
> Rockbox now runs on many more devices than these old Archoses, and
> with
> each new device, new challenges and opportunities arose. We now
> support
> colour screens, CPU decoding, touchscreens, and many features that
> were
> inspired by new and more powerful hardware.
>
> These newer devices are now vastly more popular than the Archoses, and
> this combined with the Archoses being different in some important ways
> (using a hardware codec, and for the Jukebox, using a character cell
> display) has meant that during the last few years Rockbox for the
> Archoses has not had the maintenance it really needs. This is e.g.
> visible on the build page [1], where you can see that the build
> for the
> Archos Recorder has been broken for more than a year, due to it (and
> soon, probably, some of its siblings) really needing to move to a
> different way of booting (a move the non-Archos ports made back when
> they started).
>
> The work needed to keep the Archos port alive is not impossible,
> but at
> least for the past two years, nobody has stepped up. We don't even
> know
> if anyone still has one of these devices in active use.
>
> I think it's now time to let the Archos port rest. Without it, rockbox
> would not have existed, but the way we treat it currently is not
> what it
> deserves. We don't want people to Rockbox on the Archoses as an
> annoyance that keeps breaking the build.
>
> Let us try to remember Rockbox on the Archos in its glory days,
> when it
> showed the world what a digital audio player could really do.
>
> I propose we let 3.13 be the last rockbox release that supports
> the old
> Archos devices, and that we won't try to force them into the 3.14
> release again.
>
> I also propose we stop auto-building the Archos ports right away, and
> that we consider any HWCODEC or CHARCELL code to be available for
> cleanup after 3.14 has been released (such cleanup can destabilise the
> code, and we want 3.14 out soon)
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Frank
>
> [1] http://build.rockbox.org/dev.cgi
>
> --
> "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
> Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
> by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan
>
Received on 2014-02-11