This is the first release of the completely rewritten xiron and meant to be a pre-release towards 0.2.0. The intended audience for this release are developer, tester and package maintainer who are encouraged to test this release and send bugfixes for 0.2.0.
i've decided to rewrite xiron from scratch in favor of a new and much simpler architecture. the former design was rather complex and attempted to reimplement many things already present in modern scripting languages (like dynamically loading extension modules). the new xiron has now a thin layer which interfaces xine to ruby and many higher level functions are implemented in ruby itself. this is very efficient since ruby has a powerful standard library and most other parts needed to build media players (like gtk) are already available as extensions. so stay tuned for the next xiron release "pure energy". :-)
at last there is a new xiron release :). most notably, the added support for skinned windows, buttons and labels finally made the first gtk2 based gui possible. so the xiron framework now comes with a somewhat usable default skin. a lot of stuff has been improved behind the scenes, too. the interface to the scripting engine has been rewritten, modules can now initialize its subsequent libraries threadsave through special startup callbacks and the playlist is now handled more flexible.
this release fixes a race condition which prevented xiron to run on smp and ht machines. despite some other fixes and minor improvements, the xiron framework comes now with a browser plugin to play most online streams. a started xiron instance can now be remotely controlled using a socket.
the first release of xiron, the xine frontend framework, is finally out. please try it out and post your experiences with this release.