External Plugin and sort sequence of tracks

[James Wyper <jrwyper yahoo co uk>]

Hi

A couple of questions here:

1. As I mentioned last month, I'm developing my own external plug-in 
(DBus server) for rygel.  For small (and static) music collections it's 
working OK on most of the UPnP clients I've tested it with, apart from 
one.  This is a Roberts Stream 63i radio (so an embedded client), and 
the problem is that music tracks are being displayed in alphabetical 
order, not track sequence.  It only happens with this client, and the 
client works fine with other UPnP servers (minimserver, serviio, 
minidnla, mediatomb).

I'm using the most recent release (including the fix to bug 720672) so 
rygel should be passing through the sort sequence from the external 
plugin unchanged.  My DBus server is passing the items through in track 
sequence - and if I use the UPnPlay Android app with the "let server 
decide sequence" option the tracks appear in the correct order.

My hypothesis is that there's code in the Stream 63i that checks the 
upnp class of the container and sorts by name (or requests the items 
sorted by name) if the container isn't 
object.container.album.musicAlbum.  I've used uPnP-inspector to browse 
the same album shared from rygel and minidnla; uPnP-inspector displays 
the tracks in the correct order and the only meaningful difference 
between the two servers is the upnp class of the container (with rygel 
it's just object.container, with minidnla it's 
object.container.album.musicAlbum).

I've seen via http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnome.apps.rygel/432 
that there has been discussion about extending the MediaServer2 spec to 
allow containers to be identified as albums - is anyone still looking at 
this or has it been set aside for lack of time? Presumably all that 
needs to be done is to retrieve the new DBus property (if it is set) and 
then amend the upnp_class of the container object appropriately.

I might have a try at incorporating this myself... which leads me onto 
my second question

2.  I can code, but I've not worked on a multi-sourcefile project like 
rygel for 20+ years (the last IDE I used was Visual C++ 1.0). I know my 
way around Linux but have never done serious software building on it.  
And I have no experience with vala of course.  So - (a) are the build 
instructions on the gnome wiki for rygel still up to date?, and (b) can 
you recommend an IDE?  What development tools work best for you?

Thanks
James