Podcast support

[agg23]

In furthering the support of Google Music inside of Clay, it would be nice if podcast support was introduced, much in the style of the artists/albums page.

In addition to simply playing podcasts, previously "completed" podcasts should have some visible indication to mark them as played, and podcast progress should be synced with Google every few minutes, so one can start a podcast on one machine, stop it, and resume from the same spot on another.

[ValentijnvdBeek]

I like the idea of adding the podcast functionality to Clay and I like your proposed way of how they should work. My problem is that is currently region restricted to the North American subcontinent..

Personally I am not a very big fan of adding features that only a small subsection of users can use (including both me & @and3rson) so I would recommend against it unless an alternative can be offered to those users (i.e. an alternative podcast source) or until Google offers that feature to the rest of the world as well.

[agg23]

Would you still be opposed to it if we defaulted to the page/component being disabled? I ask because it's an almost must have feature for me, and I would prefer to not have the feature sitting off in my own fork. I perfectly understand the mentality of not wanting to maintain something you can't even use, however, so I respect your judgement.

[ValentijnvdBeek]

I really do get your point of view because I understand that it would be a very important to you and, presumably, a lot of other people. The problem isn't that I can't use it but that it is a functionality we can't test, we can't fix bugs for, we can't review the code of and hence is basically unmaintainable for us. Any attempt for us to do any maintenance would require us breaking Google's TOS and risk getting our accounts banned.

So that is my conundrum: I really like the idea but unless there is an alternative way of loading podcasts (literally parsing some RSS file is fine) it just, in my opinion, can't be merged upstream (if only since we can't review the merge request). Maybe a module system for Clay (a bit overkill) or having it be blessed patch set (similar to how mutt does it) would be solutions?

However that is my opinion and I'll defer to @and3rson to give his take on it & slice the gordian knot.