GUADEC: Banshee project reaches out for contributors

Lowering the barriers for contributors is something that a lot of projects are trying to do, but the Banshee media player project has gone further than many as Gabriel Burt reported in his talk at GUADEC. Essentially, Banshee has tried to make it as easy as possible for users—not necessarily programmers—to quickly and easily fix a small bug or add an extension. The project is clearly making an outreach effort to grow its community and some of the techniques being used might be helpful for other projects looking to do the same.

Burt is one of the four maintainers of Banshee and he started his talk by remembering back to when he was struggling to figure out how to get involved. At that time, he watched the postings on various Planet aggregators and eventually got his start by looking at the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (HIG), which led him to his first patch. He noticed that the string "Eject When Finished" didn't follow the HIG, so he grepped for that string and changed it to "Eject when finished".

That was a simple fix, but he also had to get the code and the dependencies, so that he could build Banshee. One of the things that has been addressed since then is that there is extensive help on the web site that describe how to get started, install the dependencies, and get the code. 『If you run [Banshee], and find a bug, you can get started easily』to fix it, he said.

There are still things that need to be done to the Banshee interface for HIG compliance, and "you don't need to be a C# programmer" to fix them. But he also demonstrated how quickly one can add a new feature to Banshee with a little programming knowledge.

Live on the GUADEC stage, Burt modified the "deduplicate" feature—which detects artist or album names that are textually different, but refer to the same entity—to add genre deduplication. By making a few changes to the AlbumDuplicateSolver.cs file, mostly consisting of changing "Album" to "Genre", along with some minor Makefile modifications, he was able to add the new functionality. Some queries needed changing, which he said "might take ten minutes" to come up with, but the rest of the changes took just a few minutes. Adding a derivative feature like that is a "good way to get started contributing to Banshee".

Banshee also has an extension framework that allows easy addition of new functionality, but the project has taken it a step further. Executing ./create-extension Foo will set up everything needed for the extension, including doing a git add for the skeleton code and enabling the extension in Banshee. You can have a "working extension in two minutes", Burt said. Once that is done, editing the code in MonoDevelop gives access to all of the Banshee and .NET classes and methods via tab-completion, simplifying the development process as well.

Over the last two-and-a-half years of development, Banshee has averaged 32 commits, ten bugs fixed, and one new contributor every week. There are active IRC channels, forums, and mailing lists for the project. Burt noted that the timezone coverage of the four maintainers is quite good since they live in Sydney, Luxembourg, and both coasts of the US. In short, there are lots of opportunities for those who want to get involved to hook up with the team.

Because extensions are available via a Gitorius repository and there are lot of folks running Banshee development versions straight from the git repositories, contributions will be quickly picked up by others: "within days, lots of people will be using your work". Banshee has a one-month release cycle, so "within a month, thousands will be using it". He estimated that some 55,000 users picked up the monthly releases, and that within six months, "millions" would be using the code because Banshee is installed by default on several distributions and is available in the package repositories for many more.

At the end of the talk, Burt pointed out some of the more recent Banshee extensions that integrate with various services, including the Amazon MP3 store. It can be browsed in Banshee, as it uses WebKit for the browser functionality, and songs can be downloaded directly into your music library. Through the affiliate program, 10% of any purchases go to the project, which donates all of that money to the GNOME Foundation. He also mentioned Miro Guide and Internet Archive extensions as other useful ways to get audio and video content.

Obviously, Burt's talk was another part of the outreach effort for the project. "I hope you'll join in and help us having fun hacking on Banshee", he said. Though Mono and C# leave a bad taste in the mouths of some, Banshee is clearly trying to overcome that by making the project as accessible as possible for new users. But beyond that, there is a clear sense that Banshee is not about making any kind of political or social statement, it's about the enjoyment of hacking on a cutting-edge, multimedia application. Other projects could certainly follow its lead and potentially grow their communities as well.