Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Session management

[Pavel Roitberg <pavel madman2k net>]

James Livingston wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-01-22 at 12:19 +0100, Pavel Roitberg wrote:
> > Thomas Kirby wrote:
> > > Are there any plans, say, to implement features such as preserving the 
> > > current song and play queue from one session to the next?
>
> Current cvs saves the play queue between sessions. Saving the playing
> sound wouldn't be that hard, however it wouldn't really makes sense
> unless we also saved the playing source and it's state.
>
>
> > yeah, or remembering the current search term.
> > I used to have a cool player who did that, but then Linus came and was
> > right :D
>
> Saving full source state has a number of issues, some technical and some
> to do with users.
>
> On the technical side, there is how to store it for some sources.
> Permanent source are easy, we used to have a gconf key for the library
> search string. Playlists are harder since they don't have a unique
> identifier (you can have two with the same name), we could store it in
> the playlist.xml file, but I think that should be for playlist
> definition, not random state. Other source like removable media, daap
> shares and audio cds don't really lend themselves to storing state - and
> I'm not even sure they should.
>
> If we do store the search string, we should probably also store the
> state of the browsers and similar things.
You could create an separate xml file containig only the state of the 
different sources.
In the case that the source is not available any more, you could fall 
back to the library and its state.

> Although I personally liked the library remembering my search string, a
> lot of people had problems with it. From reports, people would have used
> the search box, quit RB, and the next time they loaded it they would
> wonder where half their library had gone.
>
> If we wanted to bring back storing source state, we would need to make
> it more consistent, and not confuse people.
I can understand this issue, but I don't think that throwing the feature 
out completely was the right solution.
Simply not making it default would have been enough.

Furthermore I think that the real problem was not actual behavior, but 
that the people were not used to it, since session saving is not that 
common among WinAmp deviants.

Anyway there is a WYIWYG aim in the Gnome3 plans, which even suggest as 
you type saving for editors in order to get rid of the save button.

Pavel