Looking for a sponsor

[Michael Peters]

Looking to be sponsored on Fedora Extras.
I often hang out on the Fedora User list with e-mail mpeters at mac.com
for those who don't know who I am.

The package I want to maintain and get into Fedora Extras is the
SlimDevices SlimServer

It's a perl streaming music server, to feed either a SlimDevices
squeezebox - or feed a software client (for example, iTunes, or
RealPlayer, or the java based softsqueeze)

slimserver does not do any decoding or encoding by itself, so there
are not patent issue related to audio formats. It streams in mp3,
flac, or pcm. To stream in mp3 it relies on lame, but lame is not
required to use the software - you can stream in flac or pcm instead
of mp3.

It can stream almost any kind of audio for which a decoder exists on
the system, for example, it can use oggdec to stream ogg files as pcm
(or oggdec and flac to stream them as flac)

I do not have an spec file completed yet, I need to look more into the
perl issues - it seems to want specific versions of perl modules. They
distribute the software source with those perl modules, including
binary builds for different platform - so the binary perl modules
(which are all open source themselves) need to be packaged with the
specific versions slimserver needs as a support package (not installed
in the system perl directory)

slimserver also uses Apple's mDNSResponderPosix
I suspect that can be provided my mDNSResponder from the Core package
howl, and thus should not require any additional packaging.

The slimserver package itself is all perl, noarch.
The non perl dependencies (flac, oggdec, and potentially
mDNSResponder) are already core packages. The perl dependencies will
have to be packaged specifically for SlimServer (I tried using the
same modules installed as system modules, but if they are not the
exact versions - weird stuff happens and it crashes, even if newer
versions - not sure why)

It is my hope that at some point a GStreamer plugin can be written
that can act as a SlimServer client so that software like Rhythmbox
and AmoroK can tune into the streams. It also is my hope to add
streaming ogg support so that clients that support ogg decoding can be
used, allowing ogg to be streamed without needing to transcode to
flac.

The only legal issue for GPL packaging and distribution of their
src.tarball are the :

1) binaries they include, such as mppdec and some MS provided binaries
for running their product on windows - I don't know the legal status
on that, but their nightly builds are offered w/o them so there's a
good probability when 6.0 leaves beta, they can make an upstream
tarball without them. The only needed binaries for slimserver to work
in Fedora with ogg and flac are already in Fedora.

2) firmware for their squeezebox which is not GPL and can not be
redistributed - I suspect a simple request can result in an upstream
tarball that does not include the squeezebox firmware

3) Images - they specify their images (for the web interface) are not
GPL - but that they will allow redistribution with permission.

I have heard from a slim devices employee that they would be happy to
see it packaged in a yum repository, so I suspect an upstream src
tarball with the above three issues resolved would be cake to get.

-=-

Also - I haven't seen the balsa package claimed for maintainership.
If no one else is going to maintain it, then I would be willing to -
simply because it is my gui mail client of choice, and I'll be
maintaining it for my own use in fc4 anyway if no one else maintains
it.

-=-

That is all I'm realistically able to do for Fedora Extras at the moment.
I don't wish to get slimserver into fc3 fedora extras, I'm more
interested in fc4 (I want to spend some time with the compiled perl
modules and see if there is a better way to do it, so that at least
some of them can be supplied by System perl instead.)

-- 
http://mpeters.us/