Re: [Banshee-List] Summer of Code / Improve Banshee mac os x port

["gnomeuser gmail com" <gnomeuser gmail com>]

2012/4/4 Timo Dörr <timo latecrew de>:
>
> Hi everyone,
>
> I've been a banshee on mac user for quite some time after beeing fed up with
> iTunes and its slow media import / general laggyness. About half a year ago,
> I've hacked together the FolderSync plugin for banshee which got accepted
> into BCE (see
> https://mail.gnome.org/archives/banshee-list/2011-September/msg00087.html)
> mainly to be able to perform simple android device/ folder based syncing on
> OS X aside the heavily linux-tied banshee device syncing.
>
> After I read on the gnome ideas page that this years Summer of Code has a
> proposal for improving the mac port of banshee, along with adopting the BCE
> build system for OS X I thought I should check whether to apply for it,
> since I'd be excited to improve the mac port, which really needs more love.
> When I developed the FolderSync plugin I ran into the problem that the build
> system only works for linux, so I already had to perform all coding work in
> a virtual machine on my macbook to develop the plugin only for copying the
> resulting managed .dll into the mac Appbundle for each test run on OS X. So
> I definetely support the task of changing the BCE buildsystem to work on mac
> (or maybe integrate into bockbuild?) and I am very confident I can complete
> this task.
>
> I also have some ideas about banshee on mac that I'd further like to work on
> (open for more):
>
> * Use MonoMac to support media keys on macbooks (play, pause, skip etc.)
> * better hardware support, especially device syncing for at least folder/usb
> mass storage support using banshees internal already existing code,
> rendering my FolderSync plugin mostly unneccessary
> * fix A LOT of obvious bugs in the mac port to increase stability (i.e.
> drag-n-drop leads to crash, volume slider not working correctly, etc)
>
> However, especially the last point is very tricky. For a few days now, I've
> been messing around with bockbuild to build banshee from source on my
> macbook. I've done that task half a year ago based on the bl8/bockbuild repo
> on github from bertrand, and I remember I had to fiddle a lot with bockbuild
> (bumping versions, fixing deps) at that time. Same happend to me last few
> days when I realized there is no official/documented bockbuild repo on
> github. I found the fork from xamarin/bockbuild and DavidNielsen/bockbuild
> to be the best candiates, but after checking them out none of the actually
> worked to build banshee out-of-the-box. The xamarin tree actually could
> build all the deps, but building banshee failed (problem with missing DBus).
> The DavisNielsen tree failed to build in the dependency stage. If fixed some
> bugs in both trees (i.e. missing .xz support, wrong libcroco build order)
> but afterwards only hit new ones - only to find out that bug is often fixed
> in the opposite tree already. After 2 days of working into the bockbuild
> system, I finally managed to merge both trees into a single one and get the
> dependency tree and banshee to fully compile. But sadly I had to find out,
> banshee crashes upon start. I hit the same bug David Nielsen describes in
> this bugreport: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=647969. I've put
> my merged bockbuild repo onto github: https://github.com/Dynalon/bockbuild
> and verified with a fresh checkout that all deps and banshee from git can be
> compiled (as of today on an intel mac on Lion) without any modifications to
> the build system.
>
> So right now I am somewhat stuck. I've opened a bugreport on gnome's
> bugzilla (https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=673497), but since the
> bug is likely to be somewhere in pango/gtk+ quartz backend/cairo there is
> not much I can do about it expect to hope that it get fixed someday, since
> those projects are complex beasts themselves and digging into them with gdb
> without prior knowledge isn't really an easy task.
>
> I would really love to apply for GSoc's Banshee mac porting, but I think
> besides the above mentioned feature implementation a major task to *really*
> improve the mac port is to hunt such kind of (non C#/mono related) bugs and
> work with the according maintainers to get them fixed. But I am not sure if
> this ok with the GSoCs guidelines of doing only coding work, as well as the
> banshee mentors conception for this GSoC task. Any feedback and statements,
> especially from the responsible future-mentors would be greatly appreciated
> before I think about filling out an application with google :)

I declare you hero of the year if you can manage to get the Mac port
to be more fully featured. I readily admit that while I build the Mac
release, my primary media player is iTunes. I will help any way I can.

>
> Greets,
> timo
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