Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Hi there

[Jonathan Matthew <jonathan d14n org>]

On Thu, Oct 25, 2012 at 10:29 PM, 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'm the main developer working on Rhythmbox. If you want to chat about
any of these bugs, join #rhythmbox on irc.gnome.org. I'm on GMT+10 and
I'm usually available on irc when I'm awake and nothing is on fire at
work.

> 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.
>
> 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 quick comments on the bugs you've selected:

- #875002	choosing quit from unity launcher doesn't close rhythmbox if
music is playing

The behaviour in question is introduced by an Ubuntu patch. Without
this, rhythmbox will always quit when the window is closed.

As far as I'm concerned, applications should never do this type of
thing. Either window management should work well enough that users
don't feel the need to close windows for background type applications
to get them out of the way, or the window manager should implement
this sort of feature for all such applications so it's consistent.

- #972718	Podcast feed rendered invisible if all episodes are deleted

This is tricky to fix. The podcast feed list is built by gathering the
podcast feeds from the results of an episode query, and there's no
convenient place to add extra feeds that don't have any episodes. I'm
intending to do something about this soon, either as part of a
redesign of the podcast UI or just by doing bad things to the query.
I'll think about how to do the latter and maybe we can work out a
short term fix.

- #63587	Can't queue a song more than once in Rhythmbox

I'd suggest leaving this one alone. The data structure that stores
playlists (including the play queue) and all other track listings in
rhythmbox can't have the same track in two positions, and changing
this will have far-reaching consequences.

- #75654	deleted songs listed again when using library watch

It would be fairly easy to convert deleted songs into 'ignore'
database entries that will never show up anywhere, rather than
deleting them. Then you need to provide a way to convert them back,
such as explicitly adding them to the library again, and make sure
it's easy enough to figure out how to do it, and make sure it doesn't
happen accidentally.

-  #144334	Rythmbox should scan for new music on start by default

Pretty sure it already does, at least when you have library monitoring enabled.

- #160920	Drag-and-drop playlist support missing

I don't have a coherent idea of what people use external playlist
files for in rhythmbox, so I don't have much motivation to fix bugs
like these. It's probably not difficult to fix any individual bug like
this one, but if you do, are you any closer to having something
useful?

- #228422	Rhythmbox doesn't deal sanely with multiple artist CDs

This was fixed ages ago. Enter an album artist for the CD and the
tracks are extracted to a single folder with that name, rather than
separate folders for each artist.

- #316959	Music folder appears twice in Rhythmbox

This no longer occurs with the new import dialog. I'll have to work
out whether I actually wanted that to happen or whether I just didn't
bother to keep the code that adds the shortcut for the Music folder.

- #329389	"Party mode" ununderstandable and undocumented

I think calling it 'ununderstandable' is a bit of a stretch, and I
don't think documenting it will help. I'm really not sure what to do
about party mode.

- #1038738	Rhythmbox does not show the Library Location

I'm working on doing something less stupid here, eventually.

- #1070541	Collapsible menus on Rhythmbox have their arrows on the wrong side

Changing the layout here probably isn't as simple as it seems, but it
definitely could be improved.

- #1070701	Track progress indicator does not appear inactive at startup

Just fixed this in git commit fc9985f

- #622004	Rhythmbox does not remember column width

If you're really conservative about how you apply the stored column
widths, it might not be too difficult to get this working. I'm scared
of making GtkTreeView angry so I haven't really tried working on this.

- #875176	Pressing Ctrl+W fails to close Rhythmbox window

I don't see why ctrl-w should close the window when ctrl-q already
exists and rhythmbox is not a multi-window application.

- #991107	Typo in button labels for Rhythmbox lyrics viewer

just pushed a fix for this.

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

Good luck, and I hope we can get most of these sorted out.