As I said, I do not wish to annoy anyone. I really respect the work that he did on this and would hate to see it just die. At the same time I see great effort being put into solving problems that he had already solved during his work on this. And very importantly, each of these solutions being put forward are more myopic that his solution is. I use myopic in the dictionary sense of being narrowly focused, not the urban sense of lacking vision. I have no interest in being disrespectful to anyone. I cannot do it myself so I have a tonne of respect for those who can, and volunteer their time so I can enjoy the features too.
Gratitude is a must (yeah).
Furthermore, I suspect the project to be much farther along than most people realize. When asked, Montellese gave these
reasons for not making a PR and that time. He then outlined
some targets that he wanted to hit to bring it closer to a PR. After getting the settings work into Kodi, and putting in some more work, he listed some
achievements in regards to the python interface and provided the test addon for Emby. I tried that Emby test plugin, it was very simple but it provided a significant portion of the functionality that Emby for Kodi did. Yes it did not do music that's true. But a lot of the users of Emby for Kodi and EmbyCon do not use it for music. And I suspect that if Media Import was mainlined with video only, there may be more people interested in extending it. Many people think it's half baked but it is not. I supect if they try it, they may find it quite palatable. It make just need to be taken out of the baking thin and some icing placed on it.
Consider for example, we are now able to add items from plugins into the library. At the time that was added to Kodi, Montellese was working on Media Import or maybe had just stopped. In putting forward the PR, the author sited Media Import and said it was way off into the future. So items from plugins were added. That has been revisited a few times to handle conflicts that arise as a result of its addition. What was added in that pull request was already possible with Media Import. I also suspect that subsequent fixes may have already been there too.
I followed Montellese's PR's as he worked on this, and it was clear to me that his work was greatly respected by fellow team members. I am not a programmer so I cannot tell by looking at the code. However, the comments of other team members spoke volumes about the quality of his code. From what I can discern, his code is well thought out clean and extensible. The code he wrote can be built upon. If he is right, and I think he is, let's not bumble and stumble to come to a conclusion that he did years ago. Maybe the least we could do is ask authors, of pull requests that are dealing with similar functionality, to take a look and see if they could contribute a PR or two to Media Import. Or say take a look at the Emby Test addon and see if could be modified to suit your needs. In doing so, we would at least make them aware of the vision and educate them as to how far it has progressed.
Some other thoughts
It has been mentioned in github discussions about moving Kodi in a direction than will enable it to behave as a headless server. A lot of the discussions, decisions by and conflicts with FernetMenta revolved around just that. Maintaining current features and adding new ones in such a way that the architecture supports running as a headless server. That is to be applauded emphatically.
Whereas Kodi may not be there as a server yet. It is the best HTPC software out there. Furthermore, even though it is not often referred to that way, it is the best client in the HTPC business. There could not be a better expression to describe the ultimate client other than
"It plays everything, or almost everything, that you can throw at it". And that is the expression often used to describe Kodi. Maybe the first time I heard that was when it was chosen as the base for Boxee and the 'Evangelist' was on Cranky Geeks. There were more alternatives back then to choose from. Media Import is just the elegant, well thought out, beautifully executed way to throw more things at it. While we work on making it the ultimate server, let's not forget to polish it as the the ultimate client that it is right now.
Thanks for taking the time to read rant.
Cheers
LongMan
LongMan climbs down from his soap box and hopes his message reaches the correct ears.
