Munckfish.net

A while ago I coded a small patch which I submitted to the Banshee music player project. It has a plugin which supports sharing of your music library via the DAAP protocol, but it was only sharing individual tracks and not playlists which made browsing a large collection a little tedious. So I cooked up a little code to solve the problem and attached it to a new bug in Banshee’s bug tracker.

I was happy to find my patch was accepted and was eventually released in version 0.13. I’m even happier to find that with the upcoming release of Ubuntu 7.10 my patch has found it’s way downstream to my favourite distro too.

It’s interesting to chart the progress of an open-source contribution: I submitted my patch upstream (i.e. directly to the Banshee) on 13th Feb 2007, it made it into a stable release six months later on the 5th August 2007, and now in October it’s beginning to make it downstream into the distributions. In total around eight months have passed. At first this appears to be a long time but it’s better new features don’t float downstream too quickly so they have more time to mature.