GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 594751
Should use relative URIs for the tracks on the DB
Last modified: 2020-03-17 08:25:22 UTC
Since Banshee has switched to use always absolute URIs for the CoreTracks, we have lost a hidden and important feature, represented by this use case: - Some user creates and uses a DB in his /home/someuser account. - He upgrades his OS and uses a different username: /home/otheruser. - He wants to migrate his DB to the new home dir. Expected results: He should be able to move the DB and his files to the new location and be good to go. Current results: He has to perform some UPDATE operations on the DB to replace /home/someuser with /home/otheruser.
I have some ideas on how to fix this, mainly to create a new UriPrefix column which, if not empty, would be translated on the fly and concatenated to Uris when extracting them from the DB. This would also help with the use case that some user has more or less outlined in bug 563630 comment 4: - Some user connects a removable drive (a USB drive for instance) and imports all songs in it to his Banshee DB. - He reboots the computer. - He launches Banshee again to play the files from the removable drive. Current results: It may not work if the USB drive was mounted in a different path. We will have to discuss what to use in this extra column to be able to meet this requirement as well. Anyway, I think the work done on the patch for bug 563630 helps on this task (as it makes URIs concatenable) so I'm marking that one as a dependency.
Can this be considered a regression? I have updated from banshee 1.4.3 to 1.5.1, and with the db update I have lost an important feature: I am using the same db on three different computers, syncing both the music collection and the db. The absolute paths are different on all computers (and cannot be the same in this case). To achieve this, I used a different "Music Folder" in the preferences, which is saved in ~/.gconf/apps/banshee-1/library/%gconf.xml. It always seemed to me as a good solution to put the computer dependent part of the path separately in a config apart from the db. Now, changing the entry in the preferences leaves the path for existing db entries untouched, which seems confusing and, somehow, a bug/regression. I do not know the motivation for putting absolute paths in the db, but it makes usecases as stated above very hard to achieve. Will it be changed again? Is there a workaround for the moment? thanks for your work!
Flad, can you not just use some symlinks?
Yes, this is what I do now. And it is a valid workaround, of course. It was more elegant before, and also the more general solution I think (see the other use cases mentioned above). As I said I think it would be a better solution if there would be no absolute paths in the db, because I believe they don't belong there.
*** Bug 658145 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
What's the status with relative URI's? And what's with a database for linux and windows? Softlink is not a workaround in Windows.
Banshee is not under active development anymore and had its last code changes more than three years ago. Its codebase has been archived. Closing this report as WONTFIX as part of Bugzilla Housekeeping to reflect reality. Please feel free to reopen this ticket (or rather transfer the project to GNOME Gitlab, as GNOME Bugzilla is being shut down) if anyone takes the responsibility for active development again. See https://gitlab.gnome.org/Infrastructure/Infrastructure/issues/264 for more info.