Re: The future of Gnome CD Themes?

["Ronald S. Bultje" <rbultje ronald bitfreak net>]

Hi Alan,

On Mon, 2005-06-06 at 22:05 +0100, Alan Horkan wrote:
> On Mon, 6 Jun 2005, Ronald S. Bultje wrote:
> > ... Gnome-CD will be removed sometime soon. It'll be replaced by sound
> > juicer, which will get a more player-like interface (see Ross' blog of
> 
> Nooooooooooooooooo!  Please, please, consider this very carefully.  :(
[..]
> I followed a few threads on the Desktop Devel mailing lists relating to
> sound juice and the CD player seems distant.  In one discussion I strongly
> favoured a suggestion by Havoc Pennington the gist of which was that Sound
> Juicer would stick to ripping and add a Play button that would make use of
> an external player.

Right. I knew this would come up. We (Ross/me) talked to Havoc at
GUADEC, explained, etc. He's apparently OK with it. Seriously, Havoc's
opinion is important to us, as are a lot of other frontmen's opinions.
In the end, however, we also have to consider the plain cruel facts:
* gnome-cd sucks
* sound-juicer totally rocks
* I'd either copy sound-juicer, remove the extract button, add a play
button, be wished to hell by reviewers ("why does gnome integrate so
badly and feel like a collection of separate apps?") and be summoned
over into prostitution by fanboys ("they can't even integrate a play
button in a ripper or a rip button in a player"), or I just do the right
thing, which is add the play button to sound-juicer directly. It really
just makes the most sense.

I don't see another option. Keeping Gnome-CD is not an option, long-
term. Copying s-j into a separate app is silly. Integrating it into s-j
just feels right.

> I fear the all-in-one integrated media player and to
> me this suggestion fits better with the philosophy of "do one thing well"
> (it also sounds a whole lot easier to implement).

I agree, we'll have to consider it carefully and make sure we do it
right. Sound-juicer rocks, we need to make sure it continues to rock. If
we fail to do that, our whole quest will end up being pointless and
self-destructing. We're aware of that. Ross has his doubts, I have mine.
We all know very well what not to do.

Having said that, I'm confident I can create an small extension to s-j's
current UI which will provide playback ability, without making it more
complex than it is right now. This is a challenge for me as a coder as
well, but I'm confident I can do it right.

With all this, we're lucky enough to know that sound juicer is already
mostly translated, documented, is very stable and its codebase is
excellent. I'm very confident it can handle this. Indeed, we're throwing
away all the work that's gone in gnome-CD. But that's just a
conservative man's thought. I prefer to look ahead.

> If it is not too much trouble I would greatly appreciate if you could make
> any move to Sound Juicer a gradual transition until the choice becomes
> entirely obvious and uncontraversial.

If I can do anything to make it easier, please tell me. However, I do
not intend to support gnome-cd longer than absolutely required. Gnome-CD
has some (technical/design) issues that are not easy to solve, and it's
UI really just isn't it. Those are issues that I'd really rather just
fix as soon as possible. Anything else can be considered; please tell me
what you had in mind.

Ronald
-- 
Ronald S. Bultje <rbultje ronald bitfreak net>