Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Hi there

[Sean McNamara <smcnam gmail com>]

Hi,

On Thu, Oct 25, 2012 at 8:29 AM, Chris Wilson <notgary ubuntu com> wrote:
> Hi there Rhythmbox Devs,
>
> My name is Chris Wilson and I've recently taken over leadership of Ubuntu's
> Hundred Paper Cuts project, and in case that means nothing to any of you,
> our task is to tackle 100 minor usability bugs in each of Ubuntu's six month
> development cycle. We're focusing on one app at a time at the moment, giving
> several weeks of attention to it before moving on to the next, and currently
> we're looking at Rhythmbox.
>
> I thought I'd come over here and introduce myself, my team and what we're
> doing since the type of bugs were working on are mostly design issues which
> will require some form of dialog with yourselves in order to resolve.

I'm not a Rhythmbox core developer, but I have worked on a few
plugins, and my fair share of GStreamer, GTK and GLib-using C code. If
I have time this weekend, I'll attempt to tackle one of the papercuts
that looks like a tractable problem for which I have a good
understanding of the APIs involved.

>
> We've narrowed our focus to 15 Rhythmbox paper cuts and I was wondering if
> you could give us some feedback on them. Also, is there any sort of
> functional specification anywhere that describes how Rhythmbox is supposed
> to behave?

Some of the papercuts seem Unity-specific. Hopefully they will not
necessitate linking Rhythmbox against any Ubuntu-only APIs. If it's
something that will improve our UX on both Unity and non-Unity
desktops, or otherwise a legitimate bug (even if it doesn't explicitly
manifest on other desktops), then that's fine. I'll try to reproduce
one of the Unity bugs on Gnome Shell and Cinnamon and see if I can get
similar results.

As far as a detailed functional specification for Rhythmbox, I'm not
so sure. I have never seen one laid out, for certain. What I can say
is that making Rhythmbox follow the GNOME HIG is a "good thing", and
mimicing UX patterns that are, at least, consistent with other GNOME
applications is also a "good thing". As far as UI specifications, it
pretty much comes down to using the HIG and other "de facto" patterns
as a sort of easel, and selecting among the colors in that easel to
create Rhythmbox.

If Rhythmbox *did* have a functional specification, then it might be
out of date, since it is fairly common for a commit to land in git
that changes user-visible functionality, but I don't see anything in
those commits that updates a specification document or refers to
fixing a bug where the functionality doesn't match the DFS.

Anyway, take my comments here with a grain of salt, as I am not a core
maintainer. What you can take away from this email is that I will
hopefully be communicating with you as well as this list, sometime
over the weekend, which papercut I am attempting to tackle. I think I
can contribute about 12 hours of solid coding/testing/debugging to
this effort before real life starts to encroach again.

Regards,

Sean

>
> Looking forward to working with you over the next few weeks.
> Chris
>
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