introduction and questions

[Matthieu Gallien]

Hello,

On jeudi 26 novembre 2020 10:50:27 CET Be wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I have been going between a handful of music player applications since I
> got my current laptop ~2.5 years ago with a 3840 x 2160 screen and the
> Amarok Qt5 port was never finished so it doesn't scale to high pixel
> density screens. I've mostly been using Rhythmbox even though I find its
> GUI quite bland and a little awkward -- it does job. I was using
> Lollypop for a while which was quite interesting. I stopped using
> Lollypop after the lead developer was bizarrely stubborn and refused to
> merge a feature to delete files from the application (
> https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/lollypop/-/issues/605 ). I tried Elisa
> then but found it too buggy at the time for daily use and went back to
> Rhythmbox.

Sorry if I disappoint you but I would have probably refused even before 
reading the Gnome Lollypop issue. I have read it instead of working on Elisa 
and I have not changed my mind.

Elisa is a music player. It is not a music collection manager and as long as I 
am the maintainer, that will not change.

Amarok has been a very good player and I have used during countless hours. I 
had several times the feeling that it was trying to do too much. Managing your 
music portable device or even your music collection belongs to dedicated 
applications instead of putting everything inside one.

People may have differing opinions.

I would like to kick start such an application reusing many components written 
for Elisa. Time to do that is severely lacking. This is the only reason I have 
not done it yet.

> I just gave Elisa another try and it's coming along well. I'm really
> impressed by the beautiful adaptive design. It makes me want a Librem 5
> even more. :)
> 
> I installed 20.08.3 from Flathub and opened a few feature requests and
> bug reports. I built Elisa from the master Git branch to check if some
> of the bugs I found were already fixed. Unfortunately when I built it
> locally, the GUI is very slow. I don't know if this is because of a bug
> in Elisa or my system. I'm running Fedora 33 with Qt 5.15.1 and KDE
> Frameworks 5.75.0. I see these messages repeated in the console output
> with the local build:
> 
> qrc:/qml/ContextView.qml:269:37: Unable to assign [undefined] to QString
> Qt Quick Layouts: Polish loop detected. Aborting after two iterations.

I still hope to get time to solve that before the next stable release but my 
time is currently limited and I may not be able.

> I can reproduce the slowness when I build the v20.08.3 tag locally. I
> don't see the above messages in the console output.
> 
> Also, if I build the CMake install target as I usually do to install to
> ~/local, Elisa fails to load the QML files. I searched the Qt
> documentation if there is some environment variable to tell it where to
> search but did not find anything. If I run the binary from the CMake
> build directory it works.
> 
> QQmlApplicationEngine failed to load component
> qrc:/qml/ElisaMainWindow.qml:12:1: module "org.kde.elisa" is not installed

I almost never install it myself. No idea why the install is failing. Did you 
try to debug the QML plugins loading (see https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtquick-debugging.html)

> I was a KDE user for many (10?) years before I got my current laptop and
> switched to GNOME for the better high pixel density support. I still use
> some KDE applications, particularly KDevelop. I wrote a little JS plugin
> for Amarok years ago before I learned C++ but I haven't contributed code
> to KDE before.
> 
> Most of the coding I do is for Mixxx where I am a maintainer. Mixxx also
> uses C++ and Qt. The GUI uses a home-baked XML layout system for
> QWidgets that predates Qt's .ui files. We're planning on experimenting
> with QML for some upcoming features which might eventually lead to
> redoing the main window in QML. I haven't worked with QML before so
> maybe I can learn by working on Elisa. :)

I have used Mixxx this year with great success to play music at a family 
gathering. Thanks for this nice application.

Qml is a dream made true for me. I have learn GUI coding in C++ with Microsoft 
MFC years ago and had to use an obscure old Gui library at work for years. qml 
is really allowing me to do my work and to efficiently build interfaces. In my 
opinion, the time spent learning it is well spent.

> Is there any chat system for Elisa or is this mailing list the primary
> means of communication? I looked for an Elisa room on the KDE Matrix
> server but there is not one.

Not at the moment. Maybe, you could help us to do that ?
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