Bringing Cantata under the KDE umbrella?

[Heiko Becker]

On Tuesday, 21 February 2023 07:04:03 CET, Harald Sitter wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 20, 2023 at 1:18 PM Aleix Pol <aleixpol at kde.org> wrote:
>> On Mon, Feb 20, 2023 at 12:28 AM Heiko Becker 
>> <heiko.becker at kde.org> wrote: ...
>
> +1. That said, what we could do is incubate into playground and see if
> we can assemble the required "Healthy team (healthy proportion of
> volunteers, inclusive towards new contributors, ideally more than one
> developer)" if not the incubation would simply fail.

I just read a bit through the list of incubating/incubated projects and 
there are quite a few projects where the team size is exactly 1: 
TellySkout, Haruna, Homebrew, Mycroft, Snorenotify, BabeQt, KDiff3, Ikona, 
Kup, TotalReqall, GitKlient, libpercentualcolor (if the information on the 
wiki page is accurate of course).

>> It feels wrong to incubate a project that is already out of
>> development. Especially when we already have a number of music
>> players...
>
> I feel like there is a bit of nuance here. AFAIK neither libvlc nor
> gstreamer have support for mpd so this does occupy a niche of its own.
> Now, whether that justifies having yet another UI instead of investing
> into backend abstraction of one of our existing UIs is another
> question entirely. A question I would expect to get an answer TBH. Why
> incubate cantata when we could make elisa or juk grow mpd support?
> There is a substantial amount of code in the UI.

Most likely I'm influenced by my usecase, which mostly revolves around 
having a huge collection of music and listening to it, but I don't think 
juk is a good match for that. Its just seems to aim a simple player. Elisa 
is a bit better in that regard, and certainly looks fancy, but it still 
elides to much information or doesn't allow me to show it in the first 
place. And both are missing features Cantata has and I like to use. With 
all respect for the two players and their authors, but writing an MPD 
abstraction (which I suspect would not be anywhere near trivial) for them 
*and* improve them is just a too big task, sorry. (And I'm not sure, given 
my perceived scope of juk, if it even would be welcomed).

That being said, abstractions and reuse would be nice. I can name at least 
three places where e.g. cover fetching is broken and not having to fix it 
in three places and maybe even three ways would be nice. Lyrics are a 
similar topic.

Regards,
Heiko