[Banshee-List] Changes planned in Ubuntu

[Didier Roche <didrocks ubuntu com>]

Hey banshee dev/users,

as some of you know, Banshee is planned to be the default for Ubuntu
Netbook Edition 10.10.

The idea is to start the MeeGo interface per default, with some changes
that I will push upstreamed as well (and hope you will accept them).
Basically here is the summary of things that are needed and some I'm
working on for default inclusion:

- HAL-free banshee:
the discussion already began with lamalex, alan and aaron. Apparently
the branch should be reviewed this week for master inclusion.

- Meego interface by default:
This interface suit for UNE as it's intended to be used on laptop. No
impact on traditional ubuntu desktop as in debian/ubuntu the
banshee-meego is a separate package (with an additional .desktop file).
I have some tweaks (for now in bzr, but I will format them in git once
I've finished to play the changes):
https://code.launchpad.net/~didrocks/banshee/une-modif. Those are doing:
* debranding (not in the code but in the display) replacing meego by
netbook to be more generic
* starting only one interface at a time (thanks Bertrand!): either
banshee (with $ banshee) or the netbook interface ($ banshee
--client=MeeGo)
* quit on explicit shutdown request (still not close when clicking on
the close button in the decoration bar)
* enable switching on the 2 interfaces. I think this is done in the good
way: if you have the MeeGo interface installed, there is one additional
button in the main interface to switch to the MeeGo one. And only one is
showing at a time (that is to say, when you click on the switching
button, you have either the MeeGo interface, or the traditional one)

- "ready to rock banshee":
the idea is to minimize the amount of manipulation to be able to start
listen music/reading video with banshee.
For that, avoiding prompting on first launch (do you imagine if every
software you use prompt at startup) and enabling the plugin for import
in ~/Music and ~/Video by default seems reasonable. Prompting is really
a disruptive experience. It seems others distros are already doing that.

However, we have to show a way for people discovering the feature. It's
possible to show a status if the collection is empty (thanks Bertrand,
again!) in the main interface to say "hey, your collection is empty, you
can drop music there…". If you look at the other conversion on the ML
about showing things in status bar, I'm currently stuck at showing the
same in the MeeGo interface, but that's a detail.

Thoughts? Tell me things that can go upstream or not and I'll prepare
git format-patch for them.

Cheers,
Didier