Re: [Banshee-List] Sync to Folder / plans for Dap on Mac OS X?

["Andres G. Aragoneses" <knocte gmail com>]

Hey Timo, welcome!

See inline:

On 09/16/2011 10:18 AM, Timo Dörr wrote:
> Hi everybody,
>
> since iTunes sucks big time when handling media files stored on a NAS, I
> looked on current banshee-on-mac status and found the recently posted
> Lion build (see mail:
> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/banshee-list/2011-September/msg00020.html) which
> works quite good on my snow leopard machine, too (with the same
> mentioned dragging glitches that were discussed for Lion). Kudos for
> that build, btw!
>
> Now I found that banshee on mac has disabled all kind of Dap/device
> syncing stuff. As I store all my music on a NAS in the network, I
> occasinally need to sync some playlists with new/recent music to my
> macbook and my android device when I'm at home to have some music with
> me on the go.

It is disabled because, as you noticed, nobody implemented MacOS support.

> That's why I've started a little hacking and created a basic
> DirectorySync Addin, which is currently capable to do this. Everything
> is very ugly right now but the copy process to my android device and
> creation of .m3u lists works so far. See a screenshot here:
> http://dl.dropbox.com/u/14469783/Ohne%20Titel.png

Woo, great!


> Now I dug into the banshee sourcecode and found most of the
> functionality i imeplemented is arelady there in the Dap/MassStorage
> backends. I think a cleaner solution would be for me to implement a new
> device type "FolderDevice" based on the device interfaces already
> defined and have banshee do all the syncing. But it seems to me the Dap
> stuff is tightly coupled to dbus/gnome libs for hardware detection,
> which is the reason its disabled on Mac OS X builds, isn't it?

I'm no expert (yet) in all of Banshee's abstractions, but from what I've 
read in the source over the years, you're not completely correct.

First, Banshee is divided in a lot of assemblies (libraries and 
executables). I guess the ones relevant to our discussion are:

Banshee.Dap.dll
Banshee.Dap.MassStorage.dll
Banshee.Services.dll
Banshee.Osx.dll

In theory, the two first ones (Dap) contain all the relevant bits that 
you unfortunately have been duplicating. They should not depend at all 
on non-cross-platform dependencies (I just did a search on those 
projects for the word "dbus", and in their references, and no results). 
Take in account that some "gnome libs", as you name them, are still 
cross-platform (otherwise banshee couldn't work on Lion as it worked for 
you), like gtk, gdk, etc.

So, it's ok for Banshee.Dap.dll to link to Gtk and Gdk, but it wouldn't 
be OK that Banshee.Dap depends on Banshee.Unix.dll (which may work in 
MacOS but not in Windows), Banshee.Gio.dll (which would just work on 
Linux AFAIU), etc.

This is the reason why Banshee.Dap.dll and Banshee.Dap.MassStorage.dll 
depend on Banshee.Services, which contains several interfaces (i.e. 
under the Banshee.Hardware namespace, that are later used in the 
separate platform-specific DLLs).

So if you are still with me, I guess you already noticed I mentioned 
something that you may have not seen: Banshee.Osx.dll, a library which 
is actually already implementing some Banshee.Hardware interfaces. I 
guess, because of lack of developer time/resources, this library was not 
finished and then Dap support is marked as disabled in the Mac build.


> Is there currently a roadmap for banshee on mac that will introduce
> basic Dap stuff at least to some extend where all current devices are
> not compiled in, but the core syncing infrastructe? That way I could
> create a FolderDevice backend that would be usable on mac. If that's
> currently not the case, I would continue to work on the addin-based
> solution and maybe do some cleanup and refactoring to try getting it
> into mainline BCE. Of course only if there is demand by users for that
> addin.

The main Roadmap is https://live.gnome.org/Banshee/Roadmap .

As you see from that, we lack non-Linux developers so your help is 
highly appreciated.

Having your work in BCE is great, better than nothing and a lot of users 
will appreciate it if it gets bundled/packaged as soon as possible. But 
the longer term solution is start merging your code with the 
Banshee.Osx.dll to make it work out of the box in Banshee.Core, like it 
does for other platforms.

So, if I were you, I would start hanging out with us in 
irc://irc.gnome.org/banshee to ask for advice and let us know about your 
progress!

 Cheers,

   Andres

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