Am 29.03.2013 22:29, schrieb Lucas Lira Gomes:
Hey,
Hey,
I'm doing well to some extent. Thanks to ask. Hope you're well too.
Sure, better than ever ;-)
But, unfortunately, I must say that I do not intend to integrate
libtomahawk with Amarok anymore. Please, don't get me wrong. I'm not
saying that all my GSoC work was in vain and that the confidence that
everyone had in me was an error. In fact, I have been trying to separate
libtomahawk from the rest of the Tomahawk code until the end of January.
However, simple changes were demanding a huge effort. All that just to
separate, because we still had to do a Macgyver on the database stuff.
Having another database running just because a plugin required that is
somewhat difficult to accept in the long run. All that made me feel
really frustrated for a while, since I haven't met my expectations
neither in Tomahawk nor in Amarok.
To be honest that really disappoints me:
I had always kept telling you that I was more than happy to help make
libtomahawk a proper usable library and to work on that myself as well.
I know you had to fight the database stuff a lot. I see that one can
dislike the second database.. STILL I'm convinced we were very open to
compromises and offered/asked you *several* times to discuss what you're
up to - in fact - I demanded you to talk more to me/us during GSoC ...
you promised to do so in future and now once again you've been fiddling
around on your own for months without discussion. I'm pretty sure if you
told us that the second database approach certainly doesn't work you, we
would have found a solution together...
Furthermore we told you that using the second database should be the
first temporary step, so we can make sure everything is basically
working first and you don't start with the most error prone part ...
Going awol was probably a consequence of that problem. And the fact that
I care about both communities made this situation bother me even more.
So, after doing some serious thinking in January, I decided that
integrating libtomahawk wasn't the right thing to do. I couldn't know at
the very beginning of my GSoC how that would end and that obviously was
a tough decision to make.
Once again: not communicating is the worst thing you can do - it's the
best way to piss people off and make them think you took the money and
now don't care for the project anymore ...
Tomahawk is really full of great ideas and I completely understand why
everybody insisted on the idea of using its code, since making
everything from the scratch must be always our last card to play.
Seriously, I'd learned a lot with all the design choices that were made.
Resolvers, the protocol itself, the way that XMPP and its XEPs were used
for peer discovery were simply outstanding ideas.
... and I'm still sure it's a terrible idea to reimplement all of this.
But fear not, as a consequence of everything aforementioned I started to
develop a new library, even though I knew that Domme was against this
alternative, to do everything that was planned during my GSoC. I call it
TPLib, but maybe I should change its name for something that resembles
more its social features afterwards. In spite of that, I guess many of
you are now asking yourselves why I haven't told anybody about that yet.
Well, people tend to accept an ongoing work easier than just promises,
as both Andy Hunt and David Thomas wisely pointed out in the Pragmatic
Programmer.
As much as I'm against this in the long run, maybe it will help us
determine where the problems in the libtomahawk API are and make it
usable for you at last...
And speaking of that, I believe that I owe everyone apologies.
Especially, for you Domme. Your commitment as a mentor was exceptional.
Your several emails, even after GSoC are a concrete proof of this.
Tomahawk team, in my opinion, should be really proud of having a
contributor with such great sense of community.
Thanks, the not so romantic view on this might be:
I was your mentor and let you pass the evaluations, if this doesn't make
its way upstream I have to justify why ... maybe not officially but at
least to myself.
To be honest, I still need at least three months for having it working
as desired for a first release. Despite that, I've made all the stuff
related to sources management, control connection, database sync
connection and I'm polishing the stream connection stuff right now.
Although the three connection types were almost done, I'm focusing on
getting the part of having access to peers collections first. Along with
units tests to validate my work. Right now, for instance, the library
has something about 7000 lines of code, regardless of cmakelists and
non-c++/qt related files.
I would have much preferred, if you merged your already finished work
first and then worked on improving it (even if it was with your own
library) ... currently it looks like you just vanished from the face of
the earth after not completely finishing your project.
<snip>technical details</snip>
Will look at that some time next week after some exam.
Apart from technicalities, I'm really enjoying the whole experience of
building up a library from scratch. Up to now this has lead me to
several improvements in my coding skills; from tests to API design. In a
way that, TPLib will be a reflect of everything that these 2 years of
floss and patient friends had taught me.
Certainly good to earn these experiences, I still hope your work can in
one way or another be integrated back into libtomahawk at some point -
who knows.
Last but not least, I don't know if someone from our team still want to
integrate tomahawklib with Amarok after all that was said in this email.
Especially now that another GSoC is beginning. Otherwise, I can help
clarifying what I had done.
I doubt anyone (including me) would want to see another
Tomahawk-Amarok-GSoC-project right now for understandable reasons.. :-P
We (I'm speaking for the team here) are still convinced that using
libtomahawk is the much better approach:
1) it will help you because you don't need to try to catch up with our
development
2) it will help us improve our library for external usage.
Even if you go for your own library _we're still happy to cooperate_,
but seriously - for one last time - you need to talk to us. Please show
up on IRC from time to time or at least drop a line to welisten@, tell
us what you're up to - otherwise we can't support or care for your
library...
Best regards,
Domme
_______________________________________________
Amarok-devel mailing list
Amarok-devel@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/amarok-devel
