A whole load of random patches

Thu Jan 3 01:33:47 UTC 2008

On 01 Jan 2008 20:40:18 +0000, N.C. Wilson <ncw33 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> Hello everyone. I have just been trying out amarok 2 over the last few
> days, and it is great! I did however do a bit of poking around and tried a
> few new ideas (patch attached).
>
> Changes:
>
> 1. The "Group by" box in the collection browser did not remember settings
> when exiting.

2. I did a bit of general fiddling with the collection view. You can now
> get rid of the annoying track numbers and sort by any combination of
> fields

Just an FYI, it is not good to save the return value of Amarok::config
(IIRC, due to threading isues).
So the first "fix" doesn't really work :)
Otherwise, this patch looks good.

3. I noticed as I was doing this that the config dialogues are a little
> scrappy (inconsistent caps, indentation, etc) so I did a bit of neatening
> while I was there (also ported a few old Qt3 classes just for neatness).

these are all useful changes, and i can't see any reduction in functionality.

4. Fixed some odds and ends in the config boxes (greying out boxes at the
> right time etc.) Also fixed a bug with the code for opening the config box
> to a specified page.

i'll be honest, i can't really see the difference with the greying
out. i tried checking and unchecking stuff, but it seemed pretty
logical before and after.  but the patch doesn't mess anything up...2

the specified page fix looks good too.

> 5. Added some little features for altering the sort order. Old order would
> have been eg.:
> - Symphony 1
> - Symphony 10
> - Symphony 2
> Now the three are shown correctly in order.

 you definitely need to comment your code here.
CollectionSortFilterProxyModel::lessThanString needs some doc lovin'
to bo honest a relatively quick readthrough shows me that it would take me
quite a significant amount of time to parse the code, so i'm going to wait
for some comments.

6. I also made a customisable thing for ignoring prefixes on entries. (I
> find this very neat - give it a whirl and you'll see what I mean! Putting
> QRegExp support into everything is dead easy too if it would be useful.)
> This is primarily useful for French or German names, where you want "von
> Richthofen" to appear under R, but still display as "von Richthofen", not
> "Richthofen, von" or something stupid like that.

i don't like how there is now a new config pane. IMHO we need to cut down on
options wherever possible, and to be honest i think 99% of users does not
care about custom prefix settings. we can easily specify a default that will
work for virtually everyone and save it in a config file, users that really
need to remove <insert 'the' in random language here> as a prefix can
manually edit that.

what i think may be a better place for the "select how to sort by" options
is this: maybe under Group By in the collectionbrowser the last entry could
be "custom", which opens a small dialog (with just the customizable
settings). this would remove the need for the config pane completely (the
one checkbox could go in the Collection pane).

anyway, thats my opinion :)

7. Probably a few other little one-liners.
>
> I noticed that in the code there was a commented out line saying that
> showing "Artist / Year - Album" was far harder than "Artist / Year /
> Album". The only way I could think of fixing this would be to get rid of
> the idea of Meta::Album and Meta::AlbumPtr items, and instead have some
> sort of a Meta::Field and Meta::FieldPtr class which can hold a custom
> field, constucted with a regex from the tag fields in Collection Manager.
> This seems quite a large change, so I assume it is not something people
> want done? Being able to completely control the presentation would be
> nice,
> but probably not worth it (laying out your collection by customised fields
>
> with regexes would be very cool though, especially for people like me with
> hundreds of GBs of music).

you're going to have to talk to maxx_k about this, the Meta:: stuff is his.
but i'm going to side with maxx_k simply  because the architecture is new
from the ground-up and (i believe) designed to be simple and extensible...
and last us a long time. a Meta::Field constructed from a regex from the
tags in collection manager is far from simple.

either way, maxx_k is the authority on this stuff, unfortunately he is out
of irc/coding for a while, but should check amarok-devel@ (i'm cc'ing the
devel list).

Also, am I right in guessing that the huge blank holes in places like the
> Meta::Capability stuff are just because they have not been implemented
> yet?
> It would be nice to get the tagger and organiser back running.

yeah, chances are that is the issue. once again, maxx_k's domain
though, so he can give you a  better answer.

Anyway, I am very pleased to see how nice the new version is looking. Well
> done to all! I would love to help as much as possible, but term starts
> next
> week to I suspect I will not have any time.

Nicholas
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>

-- 
______________________________________________________
Leo Franchi
4305 Charlemagne Ct         lfranchi at gmail.com
Austin                                 cell: (650) 704 3680
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