unity-design team mailing list archive

[Frederik Nnaji <frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Sense,

On Sun, May 30, 2010 at 18:44, Sense Hofstede <qense@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
With this post, the topic is beginning to ring bells in my head.
What is playing the song, when Rhythmbox exits? Gstreamer or Rhythmbox?
If we close the application window, we are not closing Rhythmbox, we're only
hiding its GUI.

While i'd personally prefer embedding Music Library Management into Nautilus
(Nautilus elementary+tracker+desktop-is-homefolder+flat semantically
organized FS), making Rhythmbox quite obsolete (same for eMail), i can see
the path this is about to take.

Before i spill more beans on how little i actually know about what i'm
saying here, let me repeat what we have discussed so much now:

remove the close button, hide Rhythmbox into the indicator-sound menu, so i
can unhide the window via "show Rhythmbox"