music player database

[Jonathan Matthew]

[apologies if this doesn't look like a proper reply; I wasn't subscribed
until today]

On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 07:08:10PM +0200, Martin Pitt wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I updated the script to produce unbroken udev rules now. I tested it
> with my Android G1 phone, it correctly gets an ID_MEDIA_PLAYER tag
> now.

There's a small problem with the rules for iriver T30 and S10 UMS
devices (0x1019 and 0x1023): the generated rule applies only to 0x1023.
I only noticed this because I have a T30 (0x1019).
 
> I updated the files on http://people.ubuntu.com/~pitti/tmp/hal-udev-music-players/
> 
> > The .ini file names look pretty weird. :)
> 
> Indeed, I'll try to find some heuristic for making them nicer, so that
> the product names are taken into account as well. But I think with
> fully autogenerated output you can only get so far.
> 
> Christophe Fergeau [2009-06-17  9:25 +0200]:
> > 2009/6/17 Kay Sievers <kay.sievers at vrfy.org>:
> > >
> > > Do we define that there can be a list of .ini files? Or is one enough.
> > 
> > A list might be nice for the case you mentionned earlier (phones
> > handling mtp, UMS, ...). One ini file per protocol might make things
> > simpler.
> 
> I think I leave that as future extension to the primary maintainers.
> My feeling is that the RB/Banshee/Amarok folks would be best suited to
> develop mediaplayerid, since they know best which properties they need
> and which file format they can digest. As said, of course I'm happy to
> continue to maintain the actual DB, as new devices come in and are
> reported in Ubuntu, etc.

I'm happy to work on some RB-friendly (c, glib) code for dealing with
this.  Whether that's interesting to other music players is up to them.
This feels like a case where the hassle of dealing with foreign code
outweighs the cost of reimplementing it, though, so I'm not really
expecting anyone else to use it.

In light of that I think it's important to keep the device info format
simple and well documented.  Which entries you'll find in the device
info files, what they mean, and how an application should use them.
Much of this already exists in the HAL spec.

What's the plan for maintaining the device DB?  The .ini files currently
don't contain the information required to build the udev rules, and it
seems a bit odd to keep updating the .fdi file after HAL is gone.

> > I'd rename [Media] to [Audio] in the .ini file, and maybe we
> > should pick a distinct extension for these files? ( .mpi for media
> > player id ?)
> 
> Can do.
> 
> Aside from that, I'll try and beautify the generated .ini files.
> 
> Christophe, you said that you already talked to the RB/Banshee guys?
> Any input from them?

I had been working on something along the same lines, but without the
udev rules.  I like the approach you've taken better.

I'll probably get started on some code for rhythmbox to make use of
this in the next few days.