My group and I have tried to come to a decision in the past week about what bug we would like to tackle for our first contribution to the Banshee project. The initial bug we were looking at was causing Banshee to crash due to a clean install setting the music library to point to the home directory of the user's operating system account. There was a work around to fix it via the command line, but the developers wanted a guard against this from happening. More information on this bug can be found on our wiki under Possible Contributions. We dropped this bug because we could not reproduce the bug and therefore we figured it may have been fixed.
The second bug we took a look at had to do with Banshee's search field. This field is used to find particular songs or albums using search terms such as rating, artist, song, etc. The problem there was that when searching for a particular term value, say rating, could contain no spaces in the term search. So for example "rating=5" displayed results while "rating = 5" produced no results. After finding where the string of the search box was being broken down and processed, we found that the parser was not designed to process spaces inside of terms. It could however process spaces outside of terms. So if one wanted to do a boolean search for both 5 and 3 star ratings one could do "rating=5 | rating=3" ( | representing OR operator) They would get all songs with a rating of 5 and 3. Notice that spaces are accepted between two terms and an operator. We spent a couple of hours trying to figure out how we could go about getting the parser to not process those spaces inside of a term, but we began to realize that this type of string parsing was a little more involved than we had hoped, so we dropped this bug.
I found a bug, that I was able to sort of fix and figured that it would be a great one to do. The problem here is that users were finding it annoying that when one double clicks on a song to play in a play list with a scroll bar present, the viewing pane would center the list around the currently playing song. The bug report can be viewed in a previous blog post called "Bug reproduction". I was able to fix the centering problem, but when a song would finish playing and Banshee moved to a song that was not in the current viewing pane, the song would play, but would not be viewable in the viewing pane. One would have to scroll down to view the currently playing song. This bug has been set up as a back up or a future project for our team, but if we never get to it then I'll probably end up fixing it myself.
We finally came to a bug that would be very easy for us to contribute to, but on the other hand would affect a lot of files since it is in the names and paths of a lot of files. The developers are wanting to change every instance of banshee-1 to banshee, because banshee-1 just denotes version 1 and since version 2 is growing near they would like someone to change all these instances. It'll probably be tedious work, but it's a great and easy start. To check out my group and I's report on our approach to this bug, then click here.
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