Re: [Banshee-List] Android Banshee Extension

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

On 16/02/13 04:44, nstamato wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I wrote an Android application a while ago that allows people to control
> Banshee remotely from an Android phone. Even though it has been around for
> quite some time and open source, I only recently managed to post the code in
> an orderly way. Everything is now up on github at
> https://github.com/nstamato/BansheeRemote.
>
> The way I have it set up right now is that I distribute the .dll and have
> the users download it from my website which is not very convenient. So I
> thought it might be a good idea to put it under the
> banshee-community-extensions repo which can make it easier for the users to
> use, and easier for interested developers to contribute to. I have cloned
> the repo from gitorious and attached my extension to it, made sure
> everything compiles fine and works as expected. Would you guys be interested
> in trying it and perhaps including it with the others? As I said, it has
> been around for a while and there are a few thousand active users already.
> There is definitely room for improvement, but the basic functionality is
> there.


Hey nik, that is such a nice effort! Much appreciated.

I am sure the banshee community would love that you join the pool of 
developers that are already developing inside gitorious. This way it's 
much easier to discover your extension and distro-packagers can grab the 
sources from there and include them by default (so you don't need to 
create .rpm packages, .deb packages, etc.).

I can include you as a committer in the banshee-community-extensions so 
you can have rights to push in the repository, but first we should make 
sure we're on the same page in regards to some things:

- You should create a LICENSE file that indicates under which opensource 
license your project is under.

- Ideally, you would need to switch to make gitorious be your main place 
where you make changes to your extension (otherwise you may forget to 
sync changes frequently if you just gitorious as a "mirror").

- You should adjust to the conventions that we're already using in 
banshee-community-extensions. They are pretty straightforward, just take 
a look at other extensions and you will understand. I had a brief look 
and these are the things that would need changing:

 a) You should make the folder that contains the Banshee extension be 
the "main" folder (as this repository is mainly for Banshee extensions, 
not for apps that interact with Banshee), and maybe move the java 
sources into a subfolder (renaming "BansheeRemote" subfolder to 
something like AndroidBansheeRemote would be clearer maybe).

 b) You refer to the banshee extension as a "plugin", however we prefer 
the word "extension". That being said, we don't use this word in the 
folder names or the extension names, so it would be better if you rename 
this folder (https://github.com/nstamato/BansheeRemote.git) to just 
"Remote" (because we don't use the word "Banshee" in them either, take a 
look at the names of the other extensions: 
https://gitorious.org/banshee-community-extensions/banshee-community-extensions/trees/master/src) 
or maybe "RemoteControl", which is a bit more descriptive.

 c) This repository is not for hosting binaries, but source code. Until 
distributions pick up your extension to package it, I agree that is very 
cumbersome to figure out a place where to place your DLL so your users 
don't need to build the extension themselves, and is easy to discover. 
For this, I'm open to suggestions on how we could solve it. Maybe create 
a 2nd repository inside the banshee-community-extensions project called 
"managed-binaries"? And then we could place all binaries of all 
extensions there. What do you think?

d) You should provide a Makefile so your extension can be build without 
an IDE. I know that autotools is a very hacky solution for building .NET 
projects, but then there's an alternative: just make your Makefile have 
an "all" target that runs xbuild on your project files, and that should 
be enough.

So, as you see, not really many requirements. Are you willing to make 
these changes and be part of the community developers group??

Looking forward to hearing your feedback.

Thanks!