Default Music Player in Ubuntu 12.04

Chow Loong Jin hyperair at ubuntu.com
Tue Nov 8 17:51:26 UTC 2011


On 08/11/2011 23:45, Sebastien Bacher wrote:
> [...]
> 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 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.

Yes, I agree wholeheartedly.

> 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?

I'm interested. I guess there needs to be more communication between the
maintainers of each stack, be it u1, gconf, or something else. And perhaps more
willingness on my part to slap on short-term downstream workaround patches while
the actual issue is being fixed. I think that an approach like that could have
greatly helped with the gconf bug, especially. Some bugs may be hard to track
down, and may take a bit more time, like the one with u1ms, but Rodney was
working on that, and has gotten it fixed in 2.2.1 (which is incidentally now
waiting in the -proposed queue).

> Is there any way
> we could measure start speed, resources usage, stability etc and aim at higher
> quality for the media player?

Banshee has an opt-in anonymous feedback thing going on upstream. I'm not sure
exactly what information it captures, but I'm inclined to think it can be
amended to capture start speed pretty trivially. Resource usage, probably not so
trivial, I think. An upstream Banshee developer would probably be in a better
position to answer this.

Stability.. well how would you measure something like that? Uptime? The results
could be pretty biased based on whether or not the user restarts his/her computer.

The Banshee apport script could use some improvements as well. I believe it
currently doesn't attach enough information to apport-generated bug reports.
It's on my todo list, but I have not actually gotten around to fixing it.

Much of this applies not just to Banshee, but to all graphical applications
we're going to be supporting in the default install. Gwibber is a fine example
of poor startup time, for instance. Perhaps we need a better testing
infrastructure that does all of this. Maybe a separate opt-in package that sends
appropriate data back? That way we would have solid statistics rather than vague
subjective accounts like "takes a lifetime to start."

Another thing that would be nice is to have people (especially developers)
actually report bugs they were facing, rather than discovering a quick
workaround and being satisfied with that outcome. This was seen in Martin's post
earlier, but I'll admit to being guilty of this as well, and I'm sure the same
applies to many of us.

> [...]
> will the new version still use gconf or gsettings? what is the state of
> gsettings in mono?

gconf, unfortunately. As far as I can tell, there aren't any gsettings bindings
for mono just yet.


P.S. One thing I've found particularly annoying when working on Banshee bugs is
the lack of a comment-crossposting-bridge thing between GNOME Bugzilla and
Launchpad. As a result, I have had to relay (manually) all the requests for
information from upstream, and back.

I recall seeing something of that sort for Freedesktop's Bugzilla sometime back,
so why isn't it implemented for GNOME's?

-- 
Kind regards,
Loong Jin

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