[Rhythmbox-devel] Installation and plugins comments.

["Joel Duggan" <joelduggan gmail com>]

Hey all,

As I mentioned in an earlier e-mail I recently upgraded from 0.8.8 to
0.9.3.1.  I'd like to comment on the process and how it relates to
what I think plugins should be.

I am running FC4.  With very little extras installed from other repositories.

Problem 1:
There was no official rpm to download.  I had to dig for a while to
find one.  I eventually settled on the one from nrpms.net.

Problem 2:
I then started the process of download, run 'rpm -i --test blah.rpm'
to weed out all the deps.
Here is list of the deps that I had to weed my way through to install rhythmbox:

cairo-1.0.2-1.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm
dbus-glib-0.50-3.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm
glib2-2.8.5-1.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm
glitz-0.4.3-1.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm
gstreamer-0.8.11-1.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm
gstreamer-plugins-0.8.11-1.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm
gstreamer-tools-0.8.11-1.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm
gtk2-2.8.7-1.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm
iso-codes-0.46-1.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm
libgpod-0.3.0-1.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm
libnotify-0.3.2-1.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm
libpixman-0.1.5-1.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm
libsexy-0.1.6-1.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm
libsoup-2.2.7-1.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm
libwnck-2.12.3-1.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm
nautilus-cd-burner-2.12.3-1.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm
notification-daemon-0.3.3-2.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm
pango-1.10.3-1.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm

Problem 3:
None, not a single one, was available from an official Fedora
repository. I had to dig for all of them.

Once I had all those sorted out and ready to install, I did it...

Problem 4:
...and Rhythmbox didn't work. :(

I watched the debug output and found that it was complaining about
dbus errors.  But the funny thing was, it would work if run as root
from a command prompt.

I looked at the other dbus packages available and tried the rest of them.
Downloaded and installed these:

dbus-devel-0.50-3.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm
dbus-python-0.50-3.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm
dbus-x11-0.50-3.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm
holddbus-0.50-3.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm

Now Rhythmbox worked fine.

Problem 5:
The problem stemmed from the fact that these were not listed as deps.

Now, I know that the packaging of Rhythmbox on nrpms.net is not your
responsibility, but it made me think about the following:

Is Rhythmbox becoming too big?
Is it trying to do too much?
Why is there so many extra features that are part of the baseline?
How many of those packages are only there to support extraneous features?

This brings me to this comment:
A chunk of the featuers in RB should be stripped out and implemented
as plugins when they become available.
Namely, DAAP playback support, DAAP sharing support, iPods, Radio,
Podcasts, AudioScrobbler, CD Ripping and CD creation.

Personally, I think RB should be a great Music player and let the
plugins bring in the killer extra features.
The group of developers that do RB could certainly create many of
these plugins and have them as an official part of the RB project. 
But I think they should be installed optionally if the person wants
them and wants to deal with more dependencies.

I haven't been on this list very long and I don't mean to stir up
anything, but on one hand the developers are making the UI less
intuitive for advanced users in order to be less confusing for
newcomers (i.e. Multi-library discussion), but the install procedure
is quite complicated, far from anything a newcomer could easily do.

I guess that's all.

Joel D.