Ready. Steady. Amarok 2.0 development begins!!

[Alexandre Oliveira]

On 2/2/07, Seb Ruiz <me at sebruiz.net> wrote:
> * Engines to be external processes due to licensing?

Or maybe just use phonon?

> * Database restructuring? We obviously need a more OO designed
> interface, but do we want to use Kexi?

We need some O/R Mapping, if there's no library to do that for us,
then I think we should do it to some extent ourselves.
We can't have our code directly dealing with "result sets" (in our
case, QStringLists), they should always only deal with lists of
objects (lists of tracks, artists, etc). We have to stop using Strings
to represent and pass around all of our data.

Regarding the database itself, we should take a look at Qt's support,
Kexi, maybe even DTL.
Also, at least for the database, we should have tests. We had
regressions all the time with QueryBuilder.


> * MVC designed browsers/components?

I'll be so happy when the time to refactor comes...

> * Interface redesign. We had a couple of suggestions already, but are
> we ready to take such a huge leap? Conversely, Amarok has always been
> at the front of the pack because we do take risks.

Everybody has its share of suggestions regarding this. I'd like to see
some testing with a playlist without columns. Maybe with the user
setting the look of it in a similar way to how we set OSD now. Maybe
having other playlists inside of the playlist, and having them show
they're subplaylists. Maybe having grouping for contiguous tracks by
the same artists/albums.

But anyway, first we need to have it working. Even if in a not so
beautiful way. Then we should focus on the deep base refactorings.
Database, engines, plugins...
Then the cosmetic experiments / new features.