[Rhythmbox-devel] Artist sortnames

[Jamie Nicol <jamie thenicols net>]

I've managed to successfully change rb's code to sort artist names properly, taking advantage of the artist_sortname field (and i fixed album_sortname while i was at it). I think it is a bug that rb doesn't take advantage of these fields but before opening a bug report and attaching a patch i'd like to check if what i've done is acceptable or if there'd be a much better way.

What i've done is:

to fix the list of tracks (the entry view) i've changed rhythmdb_entry_get_string. Now, when given RHYTHMDB_PROP_ARTIST_SORT_KEY, it checks if the artist_sortname is a null string. If it is it returns rb_refstring_get_sort_key (entry->artist) as normal. If it is non-null it returns rb_refstring_get_sort_key (entry->artist_sortname). I've done the same for album sortname aswell.

to fix the browser (the property view) i've changed rhythmdb_property_model_set_property. now when setting the propid to RHYTHMDB_PROP_ARTIST or RHYTHMDB_PROP_ALBUM it sets the sort_propid to RHYTHMDB_PROP_ARTIST_SORTNAME and RHYTHMDB_PROP_ALBUM_SORTNAME respectively.

the problem with that however was that the vast majority of my music collection (and probably most people's does not have sortnames set. To get around this i edited rhythmdb_entry_get_string again so that when trying to get the artist sortname or album sortname, if these values were null strings it returns the normal artist or album instead.

Is there are problem with returning the plain old artist instead of artist sortname if there is no artist sortname property? Will this affect any other pieces of code? I've had no problems.

Should i go ahead and file a bug and attach a patch? (and also how do i create a patch? i've cloned the git repo and made my changes. don't know what to do next..)

Cheers,

Jamie