Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Re: usage question

["Ben Konrath" <ben bagu org>]

Christophe Fergeau said:
>> Think of the variety of issues this could cover: portable music players,
>> CD playing, Samba or NFS mounts for laptops, tag editing, file name
>> based metadata, etc.  Rather than experimenting with these in core
>> Rhythmbox and putting all users at risk, these could be developed and
>> mature as extensions.
>
> Most of these features (if you except file name based metadata) doesn't
> seem too controversial for inclusion in the "core" rhythmbox, so I don't
> see the need of wasting development time on a plug-in system if what you
> was is to implement those features... Moreover, arch is all about
> developing "experimental" features without destabilizing the main source
> tree, while making it easy to merge the experimental feature once it's
> working well enough.

Another reason for a plug-in system is that not all users want to use all
the features. For example, I wouldn't use a visualization system if such a
system were to ever make it into rhythmbox. Also, the plug-in system could
potentially speed the development of plug-in especially if there was a
scripting interface as suggested earlier.

Furthermore, I have noticed that Colin Walters has hinted a few times that
some features in rhythmbox are motived by a need to replace XMMS. If this
is the case, I believe that some sort of plug-in architecture would be
required to allow the "power user" to extend rhythmbox as they feel fit.

I realize that a plug-in architecture would be a time consuming feature,
perhaps it could be considered sometime in the future (i.e. after 1.0).

Cheers, Ben