Re: Default Music Player in Ubuntu 12.04

Hi All,

I know this is going to sound defensive, but I would like to clear up some
issues with the areas of concern in Banshee. Please raise any issues you have
with the points I am making below, or anything I've missed out.

On -9/01/-28163 03:29, Jason Warner wrote:
> Hi All -
> 
> During the recent Ubuntu Developer Summit we discussed moving from Banshee
> back to Rhythmbox as the default music player for Ubuntu 12.04. No definitive
> decision has been taken yet (major default apps tend to have many integration
> points and broader discussions are needed before we can make that decision,
> such as the Thunderbird decision in Oneiric) as we need to kick off the
> further discussion.
> 
> It was an interesting discussion overall and I wanted to reach out to the
> broader Ubuntu community to get further feedback. So, feel free to reply with
> your thoughts in this thread.
> 
> For context, here are some of the discussion points.
> 
> Areas of concern in Banshee were stability, start-up time, the overall
> resource intensive nature of the application and how responsive an upstream
> they were to Ubuntu specific needs. It was noted that Banshee is by far the
> better UI, but many people experienced significant issues in stability thus
> making it feel less usable.

== Stability Issues ==
Most of the stability issues I've seen recently come from a bug in gconf[0,1]
concerning SIGHUP during upgrades, which broke a number of applications
including hamster-applet[2], Banshee[3,4], Tomboy, and Evolution[1]. I believe
hamster crashed, Banshee hung hogging the CPU, and Tomboy and Evolution kept
spewing error dialogs.

This was fixed recently in oneiric-updates, but the fix took quite some time to
land, unfortunately, and as a result, there were quite a number of people
affected by the bug. Banshee has a workaround committed upstream[4] (and
released in 2.3.1) to avoid hanging/crashing, but will not save configuration
options until it is restarted as it's not very easy to reboot GConf#/libgconf
when the database vanishes from DBus.

Another major issue was a bug in Mono.Zeroconf[5], which I just completed a fix
for yesterday. I plan to backport the patch to oneiric-proposed soon, but would
like for upstream Mono.Zeroconf to look at the patch[6] first.

The other issue comes from the UbuntuOne Music Store extension when the Internet
connection is broken[7], which I believe Rodney is working on a fix for. There
was an upload to -proposed that was supposed to fix it, but had regressions
instead, so it's not quite fixed yet.

There's one other tricky bug to do with canvas sizes[8], but it looks like it's
being worked on, and the issue will hopefully be fixed soon.

I can't think of any other stability bugs at this point in time, so maybe
someone might want to point them out to me.

== Startup Time ==
Start-up time came from a bug in the UbuntuOne Music Store[9], afaik (which is
fixed in 2.2.1, which I will be uploading shortly). But on
my system, where I can't reproduce that bug, let's have some benchmarks:
Cold, Banshee: 22s
Warm, Banshee: 3s
Cold, Rhythmbox: 19s
Warm, Rhythmbox: 3s

Benchmarks were done with a 7827 song library.

Let's compare this with another default application, Gwibber:
Cold, Gwibber, with gwibber-service already running: 31s
Warm Gwibber, with gwibber-service already running: 31s
Cold, Gwibber, with gwibber-service not running: 40s
Warm, Gwibber, with gwibber-service not running: 40s

== Resource Usage ==
CPU usage according to top:
Rhythmbox, playing: 8%
Rhythmbox, idle: 0%
Banshee, playing: 9-10%
Banshee, idle: 0%

Memory usage (ps -C $app -o rsz):
Banshee: 96M
Rhythmbox: 74M

Let's compare this with some other applications (especially since I've been
complaining about memory leaks all the time since two releases back):
compiz (with Unity): 87M
compiz (without Unity, from my memory): ~20-30M
indicator-messages-service: 126M

I'm quite interested to know why indicator-messages-service needs more memory
than Banshee and Compiz, but let's put that aside for the time being..

== Upstream responsiveness ==
Now, this is something I really don't get. If there were patches that
Canonical/Ubuntu wanted in, why haven't I heard about them? I get a lot of bug
mail, so sometimes patches slip past my notice on the launchpad, but I'm almost
always present and pingable on IRC, and check my e-mail regularly.

My patches that I have submitted to Banshee upstream thus far have more or less
all been committed in. I'm interested in hearing about any outstanding patches
Canonical/Ubuntu has that Banshee upstream hasn't paid attention to.

I hear that some people think that there's some resentment from upstream Banshee
due to the whole Amazon referral ID fiasco, but personally speaking, I have
never noticed any one of the upstream developers or major contributors express
any dissatisfaction about this. Most of the negative views were from the users.

I also hear that Banshee doesn't work on the arm hardware that Canonical wants
Ubuntu to run on. But none of the upstream Banshee developers have access to the
hardware so... ?(???; )?? The bug is being worked on[10], though.

> [...]

[0] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=659835
[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gconf/+bug/848198
[2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/hamster-applet/...
[3] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/banshee/+bug/85...
[4] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=659841
[5] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mono-zeroconf/+...
[6] https://github.com/mono/Mono.Zeroconf/pull/6
[7] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/banshee/+bug/87...
[8] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=624976
[9] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/precise/+source/banshee...
[10] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=661112

-- 
Kind regards,
Loong Jin