Hi All, I know this is going to sound defensive, but I would like to clear up some issues with the areas of concern in Banshee. Please raise any issues you have with the points I am making below, or anything I've missed out.
On -9/01/-28163 03:29, Jason Warner wrote: > Hi All - > > During the recent Ubuntu Developer Summit we discussed moving from Banshee > back to Rhythmbox as the default music player for Ubuntu 12.04. No definitive > decision has been taken yet (major default apps tend to have many integration > points and broader discussions are needed before we can make that decision, > such as the Thunderbird decision in Oneiric) as we need to kick off the > further discussion. > > It was an interesting discussion overall and I wanted to reach out to the > broader Ubuntu community to get further feedback. So, feel free to reply with > your thoughts in this thread. > > For context, here are some of the discussion points. > > Areas of concern in Banshee were stability, start-up time, the overall > resource intensive nature of the application and how responsive an upstream > they were to Ubuntu specific needs. It was noted that Banshee is by far the > better UI, but many people experienced significant issues in stability thus > making it feel less usable. == Stability Issues == Most of the stability issues I've seen recently come from a bug in gconf[0,1] concerning SIGHUP during upgrades, which broke a number of applications including hamster-applet[2], Banshee[3,4], Tomboy, and Evolution[1]. I believe hamster crashed, Banshee hung hogging the CPU, and Tomboy and Evolution kept spewing error dialogs. This was fixed recently in oneiric-updates, but the fix took quite some time to land, unfortunately, and as a result, there were quite a number of people affected by the bug. Banshee has a workaround committed upstream[4] (and released in 2.3.1) to avoid hanging/crashing, but will not save configuration options until it is restarted as it's not very easy to reboot GConf#/libgconf when the database vanishes from DBus. Another major issue was a bug in Mono.Zeroconf[5], which I just completed a fix for yesterday. I plan to backport the patch to oneiric-proposed soon, but would like for upstream Mono.Zeroconf to look at the patch[6] first. The other issue comes from the UbuntuOne Music Store extension when the Internet connection is broken[7], which I believe Rodney is working on a fix for. There was an upload to -proposed that was supposed to fix it, but had regressions instead, so it's not quite fixed yet. There's one other tricky bug to do with canvas sizes[8], but it looks like it's being worked on, and the issue will hopefully be fixed soon. I can't think of any other stability bugs at this point in time, so maybe someone might want to point them out to me. == Startup Time == Start-up time came from a bug in the UbuntuOne Music Store[9], afaik (which is fixed in 2.2.1, which I will be uploading shortly). But on my system, where I can't reproduce that bug, let's have some benchmarks: Cold, Banshee: 22s Warm, Banshee: 3s Cold, Rhythmbox: 19s Warm, Rhythmbox: 3s Benchmarks were done with a 7827 song library. Let's compare this with another default application, Gwibber: Cold, Gwibber, with gwibber-service already running: 31s Warm Gwibber, with gwibber-service already running: 31s Cold, Gwibber, with gwibber-service not running: 40s Warm, Gwibber, with gwibber-service not running: 40s == Resource Usage == CPU usage according to top: Rhythmbox, playing: 8% Rhythmbox, idle: 0% Banshee, playing: 9-10% Banshee, idle: 0% Memory usage (ps -C $app -o rsz): Banshee: 96M Rhythmbox: 74M Let's compare this with some other applications (especially since I've been complaining about memory leaks all the time since two releases back): compiz (with Unity): 87M compiz (without Unity, from my memory): ~20-30M indicator-messages-service: 126M I'm quite interested to know why indicator-messages-service needs more memory than Banshee and Compiz, but let's put that aside for the time being.. == Upstream responsiveness == Now, this is something I really don't get. If there were patches that Canonical/Ubuntu wanted in, why haven't I heard about them? I get a lot of bug mail, so sometimes patches slip past my notice on the launchpad, but I'm almost always present and pingable on IRC, and check my e-mail regularly. My patches that I have submitted to Banshee upstream thus far have more or less all been committed in. I'm interested in hearing about any outstanding patches Canonical/Ubuntu has that Banshee upstream hasn't paid attention to. I hear that some people think that there's some resentment from upstream Banshee due to the whole Amazon referral ID fiasco, but personally speaking, I have never noticed any one of the upstream developers or major contributors express any dissatisfaction about this. Most of the negative views were from the users. I also hear that Banshee doesn't work on the arm hardware that Canonical wants Ubuntu to run on. But none of the upstream Banshee developers have access to the hardware so... ┓(ﾟヘﾟ; )┏ﾟ The bug is being worked on[10], though. > [...] [0] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=659835 [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gconf/+bug/848198 [2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/hamster-applet/+bug/816460 [3] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/banshee/+bug/854845 [4] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=659841 [5] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mono-zeroconf/+bug/883023 [6] https://github.com/mono/Mono.Zeroconf/pull/6 [7] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/banshee/+bug/875632 [8] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=624976 [9] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/precise/+source/banshee/+bug/872972 [10] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=661112 -- Kind regards, Loong Jin
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