Hello list, I have been working on a new plugin for Rhythmbox in my spare time for several months. The plugin allows the user to change the pitch, tempo, and speed of the music currently playing (each of these elements can be changed independently of each other).
Since I am an Ubuntu user and fan, I have reached out to the Ubuntu (power-)user community to solicit feedback. They have provided many useful suggestions that I have incorporated into the design, ranging from bugfixes to new features. Interest in the plugin has been luke-warm according to the opinion of "the average user", but with very high interest by audiophiles and musicians. I once attempted to get the plugin integrated into Rhythmbox itself, so that anyone building Rhythmbox would automatically build this plugin if their system met the dependencies. However, here is the response to that question when I posed it to the maintainer of Rhythmbox (upstream): http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg06285.html I have been in continual correspondence with Jonathan since that time, and it seems he still thinks that having yet another non-essential plugin in the Rhythmbox tree is just bad software design -- most programs ship their plugins separately, by definition. And I agree with him. But just because my plugin is not included by default in Rhythmbox, is no reason to exclude it from distributions, right? :) Here is the community response to my plugin, along with build instructions from me: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1303297 I have also blogged about it periodically throughout development, with screenshots and various other reflection: http://tiyukquellmalz.org/blogs/blog7.php Anyway, a feature of Rhythmbox is emerging[1] that will make it much easier to build rbpitch and maintain it in a distribution as an out-of-tree plugin. The way out-of-tree Rhythmbox plugins are currently structured in Ubuntu, each one gets its own package. Observe the trend: rhythmbox-plugin-coherence rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder rhythmbox-plugin-rbpitch [hypothetical] What I propose is to include this package in Maverick. This will alleviate the complicated build instructions and the need for users to install development packages. Enabling it by default would be flattering, but definitely not a requirement. Having it included in the distribution would make me very proud, and would make the users of rbpitch very happy. It would also greatly increase the user exposure to this plugin. I have never built a new package for Ubuntu before, but my main confusion is that I don't know what the political / organizational process is for seeing this through. I can technically figure out how to create the Debian package scripts; but once I have that, what's the next step to get it included in Ubuntu+1? That is why I am posting here, the history of rbpitch and its current status: I would like someone to help mentor me through the process of getting this new package into Maverick. Presumably it will need to be evaluated on its merits before inclusion as well, but I have no idea who to petition for evaluating it in such a way. [1] --> I say "emerging" because it's not 100% there yet. Rhythmbox 0.13.0 has provided support for building Rhythmbox plugins written in C in an "out-of-tree" fashion. That means you can build them without integrating them into the Rhythmbox source code and build system. Contrast this with the status quo in Rhythmbox version 0.12.x and earlier, where you had to build C plugins "in-tree". The problem is that rbpitch is written in Vala. Vala plugins have the same requirements as C, except it also needs a little bit of a push beyond that: it needs (compile time only) language bindings. These bindings are not in place as of Rhythmbox 0.13.0, but there is a very good patch on Bugzilla that (hopefully) will get integrated into the next release of Rhythmbox, which will enable this. See https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=621246 Thanks, Sean -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
