Re: Module Proposal: Rygel

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Sat, 2010-02-20 at 23:57 +0200, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) wrote:
> What is it?
> 
> I hate unneeded redundancy so I'll just ask you to read the home page:
> http://live.gnome.org/Rygel
> 
> Target: desktop
> 
> Dependencies:
> 
> * internal:
>     * glib
>     * gio
>     * libuuid
>     * libsoup
>     * dbus-glib
> * external:
>     * vala
>     * gupnp-vala
>     * gupnp
>     * gupnp-av
>     * gstreamer
>     * libgee
>     * libuuid
>     * sqlite3
> 
>   The first 2 are only required if you build from git but not from dist.
> 
> Resource usage: GNOME:
> 
> http://git.gnome.org/cgit/rygel
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/browse.cgi?product=rygel
> http://live.gnome.org/Rygel
> http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/rygel
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/rygel-list
> 
> Adoption & GNOME-ness, community:
> 
>   * Rygel is already readily available in two major distributions:
> Debian and Fedora.
>   * PulseAudio & gnome-dvb-daemon use Rygel's external plugin
> interface to expose media hierarchies on the (DLNA) network.
>   *  Rygel has pretty good integration with Tracker.
>   * More gnome app integration is planned and in progress (currently
> working on Rhythmbox plugin) .
>   * Since Rygel uses a lot less resources than some competitor
> projects, it's fits very nicely in GNOME Mobile picture and is readily
> installable on Nokia N900. The target is to even make it integral part
> of future Maemo..err.. Meego devices.
>   * We try to use the core GNOME (and other mainstream free) software
> to its max rather than re-inventing the wheels and hence work closely
> with developers of the dependencies and even contributing to the
> projects. For example, Arun Raghavan has recently been working closely
> with Edward Harvey on gst-convenience project to make sure it
> satisfies Rygel's needs.
>   * Last but not the least, Bastien  actually uses Rygel to watch
> movies on his PS3. :)

And it works well :)

> 3.0 readiness: I think so! The only specific & relevant thing i find
> on ThreePointTwenty wiki is " GObject introspection". Since the
> project is mainly written in Vala, we are supposed to get GIR bindings
> for free and we have every intention of using that to enable plugin
> development in languages other than Vala and C.
> 
> License: LGPL v2

The only comments I would make are:
- The preferences UI is pretty horrible
- The plugin API should instead be a convenience library around using
the D-Bus API, which would make implementing other front-ends to those
plugins easier. I guess it wouldn't be powerful enough for some plugins
though, so maybe it should be an interface with 2 possible
implementations, and the more powerful one having some extra
functionality.

Cheers