[Banshee-List] Banshee as a UPnP client

[Bertrand Lorentz <bertrand lorentz gmail com>]

Hi everyone,

As you might know, there's been a lot of work done towards enabling
Banshee to act as a UPnP client (browse and play music and videos in
Banshee by connecting to a UPnP media server). The lastest effort
being from Tobias Arrskog, our 2011 Summer of Code student. You can
read about his work at http://topfs2.wordpress.com/

So we have for some time now a working extension, which uses
Mono.Upnp, but Tobias's branch hasn't been merged yet into the main
git repository. My understanding is that we were waiting on a release
of Mono.Upnp, to be able to have it as a dependency.
Sadly, Scott Thomas Peterson, the creator of Mono.Upnp, passed away a
few months ago.

I would really like to have UPnP support for the release of Banshee
2.4, which I plan to dedicate to Scott.

So, unless someone steps up as a maintainer of Mono.Upnp in the coming
days and makes a release, I plan to add the necessary source bits of
Mono.Upnp in the Banshee source tree (in src/Libraries), make the
extension use them, and merge this in git master. In fact, I've
already done this in my local repo, and it works well for me (with
MediaTomb as a server).

I realize bundling source code is not ideal, but in this case I think
it's the best solution for now :
- AFAIK, we are the only consumer of Mono.Upnp.
- Mono.Upnp contains a lot of other stuff that is not used by Banshee
(server stuff, client GUI, etc.). So maintaining the bundled source is
less effort than maintaining the whole thing.
- This allows us to offer uPnP support without adding any external dependencies.
- This is not really different from the situation for our DAAP support

In any case, if somebody picks up Mono.Upnp in the future, we will
then drop the bundled source and depend on it as an external
dependency.

So what do you think about this ? Any thoughts or objections ?

Please keep in mind that I'm only speaking about Banshee acting as a
client, not sharing your Banshee library through UPnP.

-- 
Bertrand Lorentz