[Rhythmbox-devel] Bugzilla Roundup #1 (Fuzzy Matching and Tray Icons)



G'day everyone,

I've been looking through bugzilla, and there are a couple of bugs (some
with patches) that we should probably discuss and make some kind of
decision on. There are only two in this post, because some of these
issues will create a lot of debate, and I'll do more once we get these
sorted out.

Any comments about what you think we should do, or ideas for how best to
do them, are appreciated.



Bug 139196: "Fuzzy" matching for search box
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=139196

Currently the search box works by matching any songs where any of Title,
Artist, Album or Genre contains the contents of the box. There are three
main suggestions of how the search box's matching should be "fuzzy":

1) It should split the contents into words, and match if all the words
are contained in any of those properties. e.g. "livi on" would match all
the tracks from "Roll On" by "The Living End" (and possibly other
things).

2) It should ignore punctuation and/or diacritical marks. Punctuation is
easy enough, we could change from simple casefolding (making lowercase)
to "search folding" which would also strip punctuation from strings.
Ignoring diacritical marks is much more difficult; should "Die Ãrzte" be
matched by "ar" or "aer"?

3) Real fuzzy matching, that can ignore small differences in the
strings, such as typos.


The first attached patch (written by someone whose name I don't know)
does 1, half of 2, and 3; whereas the second patch only does 1. My from
quick tests, the second patch is actually faster than what RB does now,
because it only goes through each entry once, rather than going through
four times and them merging.

If we want 1 (and possibly 2) I think the second patch should suffice;
if we want 3, I think we should merge the two patches.



Bug 158168: use of tray icon, and minimise to tray
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=158168
related bugs: 318629, 317982, 309104, 124829 and others

This is a hotly debated topic; basically should we have a tray icon, and
should closing the window minimise to it? The three real positions are

1) We shouldn't have a tray icon, because the notification area is only
supposed to get used for notifications, not permanent apps. The HIG [0]
says that we should have an applet, not a tray icon.

2) We should have a tray icon, and minimise when the close button is
pressed. Several other applications, such as Gaim and Liferea, do this.

3) We should have a tray icon, but make the close button act normally.
The minimise button minimises, so why do we want the close button to do
that too.


In regards to the issue of whether we should have a permanent tray icon,
the HIG[0] explicitly says that non-core application must not default to
having a permanent tray icon. One option is to add a "show tray icon"
preference, and have it default to off. Another option would be to work
with the developer(s) of the Rhythmbox applet, and promote it to an
official part of Rhythmbox (removing the tray icon in the process).


My personal take on the close-minimises-to-tray policy is that the
window already has a button to minimise Rhythmbox, so why do we want the
close button to do that as well? However I know there are a lot of
people who think differently.

There have been quite a few people asking why Rhythmbox has moved to
close-button-minimises policy, when other Gnome applications don't do
this. In addition the package maintainer for one distro has said they
they are considering patching their packages to reverse this, if we
leave it in.


[0] http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/2.0/desktop-notification-area.html


Hopefully we can come to some decision on these, so then we can move on
to working through the others.


Cheers,

James "Doc" Livingston
-- 
As easy as 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716

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