XSPF support in Amarok

[Sebastian Pipping]

Hello Amarok Developers!


I'm here to talk about XSPF support in Amarok with you.
Amarok does not use a library for reading/writing XSPF
playlist files. Amarok is no exception in doing so
but that only means I will have to write this mail
to other players as well. :-)

In theory the topic divides into two parts:
(1) why use a library at all and
(2) why use libSpiff [1] to do that.

The latter is easy though since libSpiff is the only
XSPF library written in C/C++ available and also Xiph's
reference implementation.


Why should Amarok use libSpiff?:

 * Save coding time and (still) get XSPF right:
     From the view of Amarak XSPF is just one little feature.
     Therefore it doesn't make sense to "waste" time to
     do all the details right on XSPF. libSpiff does exactly
     that so Amarok doesn't have to. XSPF is a thing proven
     to be hard to do right (from the files we have seen
     out in the wild). Make that hard job an easy one for you.

 * Benefit from other players' bug reports:
     libSpiff is also used by Herrie and OpenMoko.
     Bugfixes for bug reports of any software using libSpiff
     also improves XSPF support in Amarok.


If libSpiff does not have what Amarok needs I would love to work
with you guys to make libSpiff offer what Amarok needs.
If we end up realizing that libSpiff just does not fit with Amarok
I would still want to join a project making a new library that
fits Amarok if it really is needed. Btw integrating libSpiff
should be quite easy.

Please let me know what you think about this.
Please CC me as I'm not on the Amarok list.

Thanks for your open ears and time to read up to this point! :-)



Sebastian


[1] http://libspiff.sourceforge.net/