Re: [Banshee-List] Banshee as a UPnP client

[Alexander Kojevnikov <alexk gnome org>]

Hi Bertrand,

Please see below...

On 16 January 2012 17:14, Bertrand Lorentz <bertrand lorentz gmail com> wrote:
> Hi Alex,
>
> On Sun, Jan 15, 2012 at 8:23 AM, Alexander Kojevnikov <alexk gnome org> wrote:
>> Hi Bertrand,
>>
>> Thank you for working on this, it was on my TODO list for awhile, but
>> unfortunately I never found time...
>>
>> On 15 January 2012 02:27, Bertrand Lorentz <bertrand lorentz gmail com> wrote:
>>> 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.
>>
>> I'm very saddened to hear about 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 ?
>>
>> Why not commit it to the main repo at mono/mono-upnp? In August I
>> asked Miguel to add this repo to the Banshee team, we now have full
>> access to it.
>
> What code are you thinking about when you say "commit it" ?
> There are quite some commits that are only in Scott's repo [1], and
> some interesting ones in Tobias's repo [2], I will push them to
> mono/mono-upnp.
>
> To copy some of the sources of Mono.Upnp into the Banshee source tree,
> I've started from Tobias "extreme_clean" branch [3]. I don't think
> this one should be in mono/mono-upnp, as it removes a lot potentially
> useful code.

I merged in (but didn't push yet) both Scott's (master) and Tobias's
(gsoc_2011) branches to mono/mono-upnp's master. If there are no
objections I will push it.

There are several forks of Scott's repo and a few potentially
interesting commits, I'm going to review and cherry-pick them as well.

The extremely_clean branch adds autotools support and removes a bunch
of sub-projects (including unit tests), I agree it's not a good idea
to merge it in as it is. Autotools support looks interesting though
and will be eventually needed to make a release.

Perhaps Tobias (CCed) has some comments on that branch?

I guess I could take over mono-upnp maintainership as far as patch
reviewing and releasing is concerned, though I cannot commit to
actually developing it as I'm not very familiar with UPnP specs. Of
course, if someone else want to take it -- don't be shy!

Cheers,
Alex

>
> [1] https://github.com/lunchtimemama/Mono.Upnp
> [2] https://github.com/topfs2/Mono.Upnp
> [3] https://github.com/topfs2/Mono.Upnp/tree/extreme_clean
> --
> Bertrand Lorentz