MediaManager, week 10 (final report)

[Cosimo Cecchi <cosimoc gnome org>]

Hi,

This should be my final report for the MediaManager project.

I worked very hard this week towards a 0.1.0 release. This is because I
will leave for vacation on this Thursday, I will spend two weeks with my
girlfriend in Paris (I'll be back the 20th of August), and so I won't be
able to hack on the project anymore before the "pencils down" date.

== Work done this week ==

- At first, I made a full rework of all the autotools infrastructure
inside the project. I split the source tree into three parts:
libmmanager/, libmmanager-gtk/ and src/. So, now libmmanager and
libmmanager-gtk are two separate libraries, and src/ holds the DBus
executables and service files.
- I then started working on libmmanager-gtk. I implemented some stores
and some widgets for the objects of the library, which would allow me to
easily integrate it within the file chooser after my vacation. Also, I
built a (still ugly! :/) MMGtkFilterBuilder widget which allows to build
MMFilter objects to easily make queries to the library.
- In the last two days, I decided to stop hacking on libmmanager-gtk to
document all the work I've done so far, because I think that any release
of a library is actually useless without documentation, and that it was
better for the first release of the project to have good documentation
rather than having a slightly better libmmanager-gtk. So I learned the
gtk-doc syntax and added all the necessary infrastructure and markup to
the project files. Now the library is almost 100% documented, although
it may still need some more love to give a deeper understanding of how
the internals work.
- I then made the first tarball [1] of the library, and tagged my work
in the git tree [2] under the "0.1" tag.
- You can find more notes about the work inside the NEWS, README and
HACKING files inside the source tree.

== Comments ==

As I stated in the NEWS and README files, I think libmmanager is way
more mature than libmmanager-gtk, which doesn't have many features yet.
Anyway, it has been a great thing for me to work on this project: I
learned so many things I'm forgetting what I've learned! ;)

So, is my work over? Surely not! I plan to keep on working hard on this
project once I come back from my vacation, and achieve the initial goal,
i.e. GtkFileChooser integration.
Also, I think there are definitely some backend improvements I'd like to
do, like attribute values validation, and surely I will need to add some
more things to libmmanager-gtk; I think it won't be too hard with the
architecture I set up for the library, and patches are as always gladly
welcome :)

== Thanks ==

I'd like to say thanks to some of the people that have given me ideas
and inputs about the project: Christian Kellner, Bastien Nocera, Felix
Kaser, Clemens Buss, Marco Barisione and last but not least my mentor
Nicolas Trangez who has been very friendly and helpful.
And a big hug to all the GNOME community I met at GUADEC: it has been
awesome!

Happy hacking and cheers to all the other SoC students!

[1] http://anarki.lilik.it/mmediamanager/
[2] http://repo.or.cz/w/mmediamanager.git

-- 
Cosimo