Default Music Player in Ubuntu 12.04

[Sebastien Bacher]

Le 07/11/2011 23:47, Jason Warner a écrit :
> I would like to welcome further feedback on the proposal to move back to Rhythmbox here. Thanks in advance for your input.
Hey,

So after some short replies to other emails there and some thinking let 
me summarize some of the things I think we should consider

Small comments before starting, let's not turn the discuss on each one 
favorite bugs, we could have the same non productive rant on rhythmbox 
or any other software, we should rather focus on the user experience and 
the technical details.

I've talked about several people in different Ubuntu teams and some 
users about banshee at UDS, things which came often about the oneiric 
version:
- it's slow to start
- it hangs often
- it claims to handle videos but the video supports is not working well 
and that reflects on the product, we should rather turn it off by 
default if we can
- it's buggy

Reading some of the comments and replies on the lists some of the issues 
are due to external factors (i.e U1, gconf, etc), that's not really a 
justification for shipping a buggy product though. The complain there is 
not against upstream but as a distribution we should make sure that 
things we ship are working, saying "banshee is not working but it's not 
a banshee issue, it's gconf buggy" isn't satisfactory, we should have 
red flags raised before release and get such issues tracked.

Those quality issues are not specific and different Ubuntu team are 
making steps this cycle to assure we address those quality problems for 
the LTS, I would be interested if anyone from the banshee maintainers 
have plan or interest to work in that direction as well and to make sure 
that banshee doesn't get broken by its own bugs, u1, gconf or whatever 
other things it might use? Is there any way we could measure start 
speed, resources usage, stability etc and aim at higher quality for the 
media player?

It's hard to measure quality and to figure if banshee has been really 
slow and unstable for Oneiric users, how much of that is due to those 
few "known issues" and if we only heard from unlucky users, it would be 
nice if the Qa team could get some statistic from the bugs trend for 
banshee in natty and oneiric, Pedro do you think you could work on that?

Out of the quality issues, some other things we might to consider there:
- how much do we want to support mono for the LTS
- CD space
- theming (the custom widgets in banshee have been pointed as creating 
theming issues)
- GTK2 against GTK3, staying on GTK2 is an issue, landing new bindings 
and porting a non trivial application to those in a LTS cycle doesn't 
seem ideal either (no blame there but nothing is perfect from the start, 
we are still fighting pygobject bugs for things that landed for a while 
for example)
- will the new version still use gconf or gsettings? what is the state 
of gsettings in mono?

--
Sebastien Bacher