Moosic 1.5.2

After over a year of procrastination, I've placed the finishing touches on version 1.5.2 of Moosic. There's nothing terribly exciting about this version, which is why it incubated for so very long. I didn't want to release a new version until I'd added a significant feature or two. My particular goal for this release was to implement support for a configuration file that would alleviate the need to specify options on the command line if you happened to always use the same options. The most significant reason why I never did this illustrates what is probably the weakness in this program's development model. Since the only real motivation for development is to satisfy my own personal wants, any issue that doesn't affect me personally probably isn't going to get that much attention in the long run, no matter how much a particular idea appeals to me theoretically. And since I, the author, get to set the built-in defaults, I'm just never going to care *deeply* about making it convenient to override those defaults. I suppose the exception to that rule is the program's documentation, but we can attribute the painstaking work done in that area to my own private little obsession.

The other reason why configuration file support never got very far was because I wanted it to have a future-proof design that would be able to cope with some fairly major internal changes that I was planning without plaguing the user with backward incompatibility when those changes were actually effected. And now that XMMS2 is on the horizon, I don't think that I'll be making any radical changes to the design of Moosic any more. All the really nifty-keen features I had been contemplating for Moosic can and should be implemented more effectively with XMMS2's client-server architecture, so I think my programming energy would be better spent by pooling it with the XMMS2 project in the form of MadCow and whatever patches I might feel like contributing.

Of course, I'm not exactly abandoning Moosic. Although I hope to replace it in my daily life with MadCow and XMMS2, the day that will happen is still firmly in the future. And I'll remain committed to fixing any bugs that are discovered and to adding minor features that people might suggest.

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