Hey all, As I mentioned in an earlier e-mail I recently upgraded from 0.8.8 to 0.9.3.1. I'd like to comment on the process and how it relates to what I think plugins should be.
I am running FC4. With very little extras installed from other repositories. Problem 1: There was no official rpm to download. I had to dig for a while to find one. I eventually settled on the one from nrpms.net. Problem 2: I then started the process of download, run 'rpm -i --test blah.rpm' to weed out all the deps. Here is list of the deps that I had to weed my way through to install rhythmbox: cairo-1.0.2-1.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm dbus-glib-0.50-3.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm glib2-2.8.5-1.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm glitz-0.4.3-1.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm gstreamer-0.8.11-1.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm gstreamer-plugins-0.8.11-1.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm gstreamer-tools-0.8.11-1.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm gtk2-2.8.7-1.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm iso-codes-0.46-1.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm libgpod-0.3.0-1.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm libnotify-0.3.2-1.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm libpixman-0.1.5-1.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm libsexy-0.1.6-1.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm libsoup-2.2.7-1.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm libwnck-2.12.3-1.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm nautilus-cd-burner-2.12.3-1.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm notification-daemon-0.3.3-2.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm pango-1.10.3-1.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm Problem 3: None, not a single one, was available from an official Fedora repository. I had to dig for all of them. Once I had all those sorted out and ready to install, I did it... Problem 4: ...and Rhythmbox didn't work. :( I watched the debug output and found that it was complaining about dbus errors. But the funny thing was, it would work if run as root from a command prompt. I looked at the other dbus packages available and tried the rest of them. Downloaded and installed these: dbus-devel-0.50-3.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm dbus-python-0.50-3.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm dbus-x11-0.50-3.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm holddbus-0.50-3.1.fc4.nr.i386.rpm Now Rhythmbox worked fine. Problem 5: The problem stemmed from the fact that these were not listed as deps. Now, I know that the packaging of Rhythmbox on nrpms.net is not your responsibility, but it made me think about the following: Is Rhythmbox becoming too big? Is it trying to do too much? Why is there so many extra features that are part of the baseline? How many of those packages are only there to support extraneous features? This brings me to this comment: A chunk of the featuers in RB should be stripped out and implemented as plugins when they become available. Namely, DAAP playback support, DAAP sharing support, iPods, Radio, Podcasts, AudioScrobbler, CD Ripping and CD creation. Personally, I think RB should be a great Music player and let the plugins bring in the killer extra features. The group of developers that do RB could certainly create many of these plugins and have them as an official part of the RB project. But I think they should be installed optionally if the person wants them and wants to deal with more dependencies. I haven't been on this list very long and I don't mean to stir up anything, but on one hand the developers are making the UI less intuitive for advanced users in order to be less confusing for newcomers (i.e. Multi-library discussion), but the install procedure is quite complicated, far from anything a newcomer could easily do. I guess that's all. Joel D. _______________________________________________ rhythmbox-devel mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/rhythmbox-devel
