The case for reviving Firefly

[blammParticipant]

Hi, I too am not a twitter user and am finding this whole development thing rather confusing, particularly as a lot of the “tweets” seem to be about unrelated things (I follow in my newsreader). I am a huge fan of Firefly and would like to be involved but have no idea what you are planning or asking for. A simple statement here of your plans and the resources you need (shouldnt be too hard for a project manager) would suffice.

[Anonymous]

I too like firefly & used it a lot!
… since about a year it constantly crashes on my server

[Anonymous]

Hi,

I use firefly on my NSLU2 – it’s great, as it does exactly what I need, works just fine and has very small footprint. I’d like to help move things forward. I’ve been involved in a few open source projects in the past, so I thought I’d reply here and add my 2 cents.

It looks like a few people would like to help, but it’s not very clear where to start! No-one really knows the code at the moment, and it’s hard to get anyone to dedicate time to it – I guess because it’s impossible to work out what you’re letting yourself in for!!

I’m going to put my neck on the line and start a few new threads up, to try and move the discussion forward. Plus, there are a few small steps we can take to get things moving that shouldn’t require too much time from anyone who would like to help.

A couple of questions:

– where is the definitive source code repository? (I’ve seen a trac one and a sourceforge one)
– is there any documentation anywhere?

Thanks!

Miles

[RigasWParticipant]

@blamm wrote:

Hi, I too am not a twitter user and am finding this whole development thing rather confusing, particularly as a lot of the “tweets” seem to be about unrelated things (I follow in my newsreader). I am a huge fan of Firefly and would like to be involved but have no idea what you are planning or asking for. A simple statement here of your plans and the resources you need (shouldnt be too hard for a project manager) would suffice.

You are so right … 🙂

RigasW

[blammParticipant]

Does anyone know what is actually happening here? I emailed [email protected] and got no response.

[Anonymous]

Folks, seriously… This is really really simple. The fork is the future. http://git.debian.org/?p=users/jblache/forked-daapd.git

This is the only place where active development is happening, as far as I can tell. The fork supports Front Row, smart playlists, itunes library xml, >2GB movie files, bug fixes of all stripes, and soon full control with an iPhone Remote. Oh, and did I mention active development?

Project management and resources are a wonderful thing, to be sure. But what really counts is code.

[blammParticipant]

Hi Ace.

Is there a windows version of this fork?

ta

[EVILRipperParticipant]

Nope, there has been chosen for linux only.

[blammParticipant]

So not “really really simple” then 🙁

[Anonymous]

I’ve been under the impression that in the FOSS world, “Linux only” attitude is the equivalent to the familiar “Windows only” thing that we all know and love passionately.

[Anonymous]

I am not a programmer, but I went out on a limb and checked out the forked-daapd commits. The BSD user in me rejoiced. All hail, it is not Linux-only.

jblache, question: why keep separate code paths for inotify and kqueue, when you can have gamin to do the dirty work for you on both platforms? It uses inotify and dnotify on Linux and kqueue/kevent plus some extra magic for directory contents on FreeBSD, so it could simplify the code a bit and make it easier to port it. No?

[Anonymous]

Well, for our friends running Windows, it seems to be the end of the line, unless someone is willing to pick it up. Not great news, but still simple 🙂

[blammParticipant]

So I guess our only option is to run Linux in a virtual machine if we want to use this fork. Is there a way of doing this using minimal resources? E.g. using Damn Small Linux?

[jelockwoodParticipant]

@ace wrote:

Folks, seriously… This is really really simple. The fork is the future. http://git.debian.org/?p=users/jblache/forked-daapd.git

This is the only place where active development is happening, as far as I can tell. The fork supports Front Row, smart playlists, itunes library xml, >2GB movie files, bug fixes of all stripes, and soon full control with an iPhone Remote. Oh, and did I mention active development?

Project management and resources are a wonderful thing, to be sure. But what really counts is code.

As you probably know, the current (read old) Firefly is used as an embedded iTunes/DAAP server on many, many different NAS servers including the ReadyNAS from NetGear. The ReadyNAS like most NAS servers uses Linux as its operating system. Are there any plans to either package up forked-daapd yourselves for use on a ReadyNAS so mere users do not have to try compiling it themselves. Or perhaps contacting NetGear and getting them to switch from ‘ye olde’ Firefly to forked-daapd instead?

The following open-source links may be of interest/help –

http://www.flyn.org/projects/libdmapsharing/index.html
http://www.flyn.org/projects/dmapd/index.html

Amongst other things they should allow serving iPhoto libraries as well as iTunes.

My goal is to be able to connect an Apple TV to a server – presumably forked-daapd running on a ReadyNAS.

[RigasWParticipant]

Will the fork still run with my good old nslu2 slug?

Rigas

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