unity-design team mailing list archive

[Sense Hofstede <qense@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

During a previous discussion on not adding an application bucket to
the Unity launcher somehow the discussion ended up at discussing the
behaviour of Rhythmbox integrated in the Sound Menu. When Rhythmbox
would be exited while playing or paused it was supposed to keep
running in the background while the Sound Menu would show controls and
the current song. When Rhythmbox would be exited the state of the
music player was supposed to be restored on relaunch, as can be seen
at <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoundMenu#compliance>.

However, in the 'application bucket' discussion someone immediately
answered the question whether Rhythmbox actually can persist state
between two runs. Answer: no, and it would be a lot of work (read:
partial rewrite of some important parts) to support this. So it is not
possible to get state saving support for Rhythmbox in Maverick.

What to do with this? Should we try to get state saving support in
Rhythmbox (and Banshee?!) for Maverick, against all odds? I'm not sure
if we want to make potentially destabilising changes to Rhythmbox'
code in such a short period of time.
That would leave two options: do not try to persist state between two
runs of Rhythmbox and scrap that part of the specification, or don't
exit Rhythmbox when someone quits it while it is not playing, but keep
it running in the background.

The latter option would add another running process and would fool the
user into believing (s)he would have fully exited the player. It would
also mean that some plugins could still be broadcasting the player,
even though it should have exited according to the specification and
if we use that behaviour consistently across the whole desktop also by
the users' expectations.

Regards,
-- 
Sense Hofstede
[ˈsɛn.sə ˈɦɔf.steː.də]