In the meantime, I wanted to write a wrap-up post about this year’s mildly successful Google Summer of Code with XMMS2. Out of 6 projects, we’ve had 3 successful projects and 3 failed ones. That’s a pretty high and disappointing failure rate to be honest. You always have to be prepared to face unplanned obstacles, but it got a bit out of hand this time.

It is especially frustrating as the projects were all pretty sexy or important, or both.

The long-awaited Generic IPC project seems to be one of those cursed projects that nobody manages to get done. We ran that project last year but it was not finished in time, so Leonid Evdokimov (darkk) took over this year, but he wasn’t able to complete it either.

We had been lucky to get an extra slot to run the S4 project, an experimental new backend for the medialib optimized (in structure, space and performance) for the specific semantics of our data (basically, short property strings attached to objects). Unfortunately, Tobias Bengtsson (ydo) got more busy than expected with his master thesis and a major hardware failure put an end to his hopes of completing S4.

The last failing project was probably the most original/experimental: cloudstream, or a smart blend of xmms2 local music playing and last.fm’s social & semantic information, allowing to play “local radios” of your tracks using a sexy graphical cloud interface. We were especially excited as it had come as a spontaneous suggestion by the student, Arpith Siromoney. Sadly, only little code was produced; we hope that the idea will live on and end up being implemented in one way or the other!

On the brighter side of things, the three other projects were a great success and we hope to include them in the -devel tree and the main release ASAP.

Daniel Chokola (puzzles) worked on getting Ning Shi (zeegeek)’s Service clients (which I mentored for GSoC ‘07) ready for merge. He reworked the concept a bit (operations involved, atomicity of registration, etc), gave the API a refresh and rebased the tree onto the latest -devel releases. From early on, it had also become clear that it would all be nicer with the result/value-split refactoring that had been discussed for some time. Nobody had time to hack it up so I did, and I worked closely with puzzles to update service clients to use the new code and giving him a hand cleaning up the server-side and IPC layer. It’s now a good showcase of the cool new xmmsv_t API!

The first project I mentored was nycli, also referred to as “the new korving CLI”, a new CLI client for XMMS2 in C that I had started to take over from my previous C++ client, nyello. I had run out of time to work on nycli but Igor Ribeiro de Assis (greafine) did a great job taking over the code, improving it and completing all the missing features and adding some of his own: commands to interact with the playlist, collections and server actions, support for subcommands, file path globbing, interactive status command, and the super cool aliases!

The second student I mentored, Erik Massop (nesciens), hacked heaps of new features into Collections (my GSoC ‘06 project): new operators (incl. Order, Limit, generic comparison, Token, etc.), server-side source preferences, support for medialists (ordered collections), new query mechanisms allowing aggregates, functions on values and more complex results, conversion of all values to strings, optimized prefix matching, etc. Here come Collections 2.0!

As an organization, we acknowledge our failure at choosing students able to complete their projects in full and in time. We had a much better success ratio in the previous editions, so I guess this year is a combination of bad luck and small defects on the part of mentors and students.

Next year, I’d like us to improve communication between mentor and student, and also between the GSoC participants and the XMMS2 community. Status updates on the planet, clearer project descriptions, better linking throughout the wiki, etc. I’d also like to focus on working on a stricter list of objectives, roadmap and deadlines with the student, to help us keep track of progress more formally. I think we already had a pretty good selection process, but that might be improved too.

Nevertheless, I’m very happy with the students I mentored (nesciens, greafine, and puzzles unofficially): they all showed dedication and genuine interest in their projects, they were very open to criticism but also ready to provide arguments and new ideas to make solutions more elegant.

I look forward to seeing the GSoC code merged in official releases; it has sometimes taken longer than we would have liked in the past, but nycli and service clients should make it to your Git tree in the near future. Collections 2.0 still need review and tests, but the possibilities are already quite exciting!

Congratulations to all the successful students, thanks to Google for sponsoring this program, and let’s make it even more successful next year!

First, the new DrJekyll release finally includes the code I developed as part of my Google Summer of Code 2006. That thing where you spend your summer nights coding Free Software on an Open Source project and Google sponsors you for it, yes that one. My project was to implement Collections, a new (awesome, life-changing) abstraction layer to help developers give more power to the users for organizing their digital music library, and listening to songs in all sorts of crazy way.

I just published an article in the LWN to explain the how’s and why’s of it all. For two weeks, it’s only available to subscribers, but after that it will be publicly available and I’ll repost it here, so stay tuned…

In addition, I’m now mentoring a student for XMMS2 as part of the Google Summer of Code 2007. ZeeGeek is working on Service Clients, a new sexy feature to allow XMMS2 clients to offer services to other clients. He’s doing a great job so far, and I’m looking forward to more power and modularity in XMMS2!

Finally, I started hacking on the new korving CLI (codenamed nycli, because I said so). It’s in my Git tree on exodus, but it doesn’t really do anything useful yet (let alone wrestle crocodiles). More on that when it becomes actually usable!

Conclusion: when the music is end xmms power of the pc.