Re: Proposed: Rhythmbox

["Eugenia Loli-Queru" <eloli hotmail com>]

Jeff Waugh wrote:
>Do we want to chain Rhythmbox to the tough standards and requirements of
the Desktop release? Do we *need* to?

Yes, absolutely, 1000%. Rhythmbox offers today a very important service:
music playback/radio playback, rip support (when sound juice included)) and
most importantly, playlists and organization for the thousands of music
files people are carrying over these days. As I said earlier, times have
changed and so the needs have changed. Four years ago I would probably say
"oh, the third party XMMS app is good enough" and would have ditched
Rhythmbox from a any DE bundle just to "avoid bloat". But times have
changed. People expect out-of-the-box functionality about these things now
and Gnome should offer this specific solution as out-of-the-box solution for
the OS distributor as well to the people who will choose to recompile Gnome
themselves.

>Users will most likely have Rhythmbox anyway

Do not assume this please. Linux distributors and OS product managers are
not all named "Havoc". Most of them don't have a clue how to put together a
good desktop OS and they sometimes even advertise as such (I better not give
any examples here, but I got plenty... ;-)
Gnome should be giving to these OS people the right solution, that's why
these people should be choosing Gnome in the first place (Gnome is a "full
solution" for them). This is why Gnome creates "releases" anyway, otherwise
we should have had Gnome as seperate libs, releasing at different times each
and then telling to these OS people "come to our ftp site and download the
apps/libs you want and use", without giving them a "generic release" of how
a good desktop experience SHOULD look like today. While this is doable
today, this is not what Gnome does as its core though. IMHO, this is one of
the jobs of Gnome at this point: to offer a modern/comprehensive solution to
these product managers who choose to bundle with Gnome.

If I was an OS distributor I would want the DE I have chosen for my product
to have already take these decisions for me for these *basic* problems, like
music playback and management. And Gnome should not fail in this respect,
because then it simply becomes  not a great "full" solution for these
professionals.

> what clear benefit is there to having it in the Desktop release?

Erm, please get with the times. Multimedia, mp3 piracy, CD ripping it is
part of the everyday life of today, we like it or not (especially among
young people who are more likely to use Gnome). Not offering a music
organization app a-la iTunes or WMP is IMHO something that will hurt Gnome,
because many clueless OS/distros will fail to include the right "basic"
tools if Gnome wouldn't, and then you get all these people in the forums
saying that "Gnome doesn't do what they want". Remember, defaults matter.

> Relevance and 'cool' in the GNOME world should not be defined by inclusion
in the Desktop release.

I do not understand what you mean by "relevance", but I do find RB relevant.
There is a basic need lately and RB has a solution for it. If it does the
job as expected, it is relevant, and this upgrades it to a "must-have". As
for "cool", I am not interested in cool stuff either. I am interested in
practicality and simplicity, I only like software when they solve problems.
And RB seems to solve some for a great number of people today.

Rgds,
Eugenia