Hackwee Day IV - The final showdown

Yesterday was a bit of an anti-climax codewise. Pretty much everything I had planned on doing I had completed by midday. I then had a nice long chat with lamalex about what I had to do to get ipod support into his udev branch and hashed out a rough idea about how to upstream these changes. I believe he's going to do a bit of work over the next week or so and once that's complete I'll be able to upstream the remainder of my patches.

So at the end of the 4 days the state of things is:

Device support:
1) Hotplugging works
2) Syncing music to and from the device works
3) Removing music from the device works
4) Basic properties can be read about the device and displayed in banshee
5) Playlists aren't supported yet but should be fairly simple to do

Code written:
1) I've upstreamed my patches for libgpod-sharp
2) I spoke with lamalex about upstreaming the rest of my work there.
3) There are now packages available for openSUSE 11.2 courtesy of FunkyM which can be used to provide most of the required packages.
4) There are still some bleeding edge libraries required which aren't packaged anywhere. These will have to be packaged.
5) I think the best way to support the libgpod based iDevice would be to create a new addin so that you can run both the old addin and the new addin in parallel as some of the required libraries for libgpod based iDevice support are very new and not widely available as of yet. This will take a little bit of time.

I'm off on holidays next week so when I get back I'll start pushing my remaining work upstream. Once that's done it's just the boring process of streamlining the build to remove the dozen manual steps which are currently required :) All in all, it's been a successful hackweek. But as with all good hacks, the 5:1 rule applies. For every day spent adding functionality, I'll need 5 to make it stable and usable for everyone.

I have to thank teuf again for all the help over the last few days (and for libgpod itself!), Nathaniel McCallum for the awesome start to the .NET bindings for libgpod, Alex Launi for the banshee gio/udev work which saved me a lot of time and also for sparing the time yesterday to talk about how I can get my work upstreamed.

If I've forgotten anyone or anything, sorry! But it's been a hectic week and it was hard enough keeping track of all the packages and patches I had floating around, never mind everyone I was talking to :)

I'll post again when I get everything upstreamed and I'll have a nice set of instructions for anyone wishing to test out their iDevice with banshee.