[Rhythmbox-devel] GSettings and some plugin removals

[Jonathan Matthew <jonathan d14n org>]

Some time this weekend, I pushed a fairly major set of changes to git master:
- replacing gconf with GSettings
- replacing the status icon plugin with a plugin that just does
libnotify notifications
- removing the visualizer plugin

While GSettings has some support for migrating existing configuration
from gconf, I haven't actually written the conversion file that makes
this happen. It looks like gsettings-data-convert isn't capable of
doing the value transformations required to migrate everything, and I
suspect it might be better to avoid migrating anything. Perhaps we
need a custom conversion script.

The status icon itself has become increasingly irrelevant in the last
couple of years, first with Ubuntu's sound menu and now GNOME Shell's
message tray as means of displaying music status and controlling
playback without using a status icon. Recent versions of libnotify
have removed the ability to attach notifications to widgets, meaning
there's no need for the libnotify code to be part of the same plugin
as the status icon. It wouldn't be too hard to extract just the status
icon parts of the code, convert it to use GSettings, and put together
a working plugin. I'm not likely to do this myself, but I'd certainly
accept a patch.

The visualizer plugin code was kind of awful, and some aspects of the
UI sucked too (I'm responsible for both of those things, so don't
think I'm unfairly criticising anyone's work here..). I've got a
mostly-complete rewrite here that I'm going to finish off soon. The
existing plugin was getting in the way of removing gconf, so I removed
it a bit earlier than I otherwise would have.

Next up on the long march to 3.0 is probably libpeas.