Kioslaves for devices (was Re: Disable/Enable collections on the fly?)

[Jeff Mitchell]

On Saturday 07 July 2007, Maximilian Kossick wrote:
> There's no GUI way to do that yet. We might still need a device browser to
> make it possible to manage playlists/podcasts/some other stuff that you can
> put on a media device in a central location. It's probably possible to
> split this out across multiple browsers( fx adding songs in the collection
> browser and managing playlists somewehere else), but i don't think that
> that's a good idea.

We should figure this out soon...I was thinking we'd have no device browser 
but instead something like exporting playlists/podcasts in the collection 
view.  It seems overkill to have a whole device browser to provide a little 
extra functionality.

> I talked to Kevin Ottens about Amarok's media device plugins yesterday.
> He'd like to have kioslaves for the media devices which would allow users
> to manage the media devices from a file browser too.

Yes, I've talked to him about this several times.  There's a SoC student who 
was supposed to be working on this...apparently he's disappeared off the face 
of the earth.  But in the past I've brought this up in the dev channel and 
Mark's felt that the kioslave API is too limiting for what we'd want to do.  
Mark, can you expand on that?

> When porting the old 
> media device code (which is unfortunately necessary, because they use items
> all over the place)

Right, it'll have to be ported, although less so if we keep a device browser 
(but then we'd...access files from both the collection browser and the device 
browser?)

> we should think about abstracting some of the code to 
> make it easier to add ioslaves for them. Kevin's idea was basically to 
> write a (thin) kde abstraction layer around the media-device specific
> libraries like libgpod. Amarok could use the abstraction layer directly to
> make it possible for us to do more advanced stuff like syncing playcount,
> and then we could write a kioslave which exports the tracks, playlists,
> podcasts and anything else as a virtual file system.

Right.  If we think that the kioslave API is enough to allow us to do such 
things, we might as well simply write these ourselves (unless the student 
suddenly shows up), so that we could then write more abstracted code to 
handle everything.  In fact, perhaps we could move mostly away from device 
plugins in favor of simply loading the right kioslave.

--Jeff