renaming Playlist for clarity and developer sanity

[Bart Cerneels]

Hi all,

It is my opinion that by calling the nice piece of UI design on the
right side of the mainwindow "The Playlist" we are not doing ourselves
a favor. It distracts from it actual purpose and confuses users and
developers alike.

I'm gonna start a discussion here that I hope will clarify the
use-case of the "The Playlist" and lead to either a renaming of either
Playlist:: namespace or all the rest involved with Meta::Playlist.

A Meta::Playlist in Amarok is not just a list of Tracks, it has
additional metadata like name, etc. This metaclass is used to populate
the PlaylistBrowser where Meta::Playlists can be added, deleted,
metadata edited, tracks appended, tracks removed, etc. For loading and
accessing Meta::Playlists ordered by category I created a class called
PlaylistManager.

AFAIK editing Meta::Playlists is not possible nor desired in "The
Playlist". Also, "The Playlist" can hold tracks from many
Meta::Playlists, there is no 1-1 mapping with any item in the
PlaylistBrowser. Calling it "The Playlist" however suggests this 1-1
connection with the PlaylistBrowser is real.

What "The Playlist" is in my mind is a queue of upcoming tracks, see
the obvious difference with Meta::Playlist, no metadata. The queue can
be reordered without affecting the Meta::Playlist you
added/dragged/appended into it.

Although "The Playlist" and PlaylistManager could share a lot of code
ir PlaylistModel could just use a special Meta::Playlist registered
with PlaylistManager.

All of this makes me suggest that we rename "The Playlist" to "The
TrackQueue" or "The PlayQueue", at least in the code. What is
represented by an i18ned string to the user can remane the same, but I
would recommend we change that as well to prevent users to mistake the
TrackQueue as a Playlist editor.

Remember: "Amarok is about big collections, not big Playlists"
and "If you want a playlisteditor use Juk" --markey

Bart Cerneels
bart.cerneels at kde.org
irc: Stecchino
Akademy 2008 organizer
First point of contact for everything venue related