that's my first reaction to this list too - is a debian-specific package really providing more value than the effort of maintaining it for a lot of this software? even libgpod and xmms are relatively high-profile examples.

i do appreciate being able to apt-get install some obscure package and have often wondered how it's a sustainable system that maintainers are putting in effort to package these things up into a distro for me. but maybe it isn't?

I wonder if the install base is is so high because 20 years ago some package maintainer decided to put XMMS in a gnome-apps (or whatever) metapackage, and no one removed it.

I don’t even know the last time I found a publicly accessible mp3 url stream, or listened to a local mp3 file. Local files had to be like 10 years ago.