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

[Alexander Kojevnikov <alexk gnome org>]

On 4 April 2012 23:21, gnomeuser gmail com <gnomeuser gmail com> wrote:
> 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.

Decent proposal, but unfortunately I won't have enough time to take a
second SoC project this year, I also know very little about OSX.

If someone is interested in becoming a mentor for this project, please
comment on Melange:
https://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2012/dynalon/1

Thanks,
Alex