New release

[Heiko Becker]

Hey Pedro and all,

On Sonntag, 12. April 2020 09:51:33 CEST, Pedro de Carvalho Gomes wrote:
> I think the main reason for the delay of a new version is now
> concluded (or at least in a decent state), which was the port to KF5.
> There's also one major issue, which is the deprecation of mysql
> embedded.

Myriam asked for a release as well. It's not much work to create and 
release a tarball and I'm happy to do it, but I'm bit concerned about 
expectations. IMHO it should "only" be an alpha release. There are still 
rough edges and one problem (besides the mentioned mysqle issue) is 
scripting. QtScript is deprecated and will go away and there are currently 
no Qt5 bindings for it anyway. Possible solutions are

- Get rid of it alltogether
- There's a patch on phab to add bindings extracted from Qcad which still 
uses QtScript, https://phabricator.kde.org/D24817 and needs at least some 
license headers and some glue
- Port to the QJS* classes from QtQml (one simple example for a Plasma 
runner [1])

Any opinions on that?
Personally I'd prefer the last option because it isn't likely to cause an 
outcry and should be somewhat future-proof (i.e. possibly meaning less work 
to port to Qt6). I don't know how feasible that would be in Amarok's case 
though, but I hope to find some time for that in the next week.

> I went after Mariadb's plans for the embedded library. I couldn't find
> any mention to it. Only references to 10.5 series mirroring Mysql 8,
> which is the version that dropped Mysql embedded. However Mariadb 10.4
> contains the embedded library, and is supported until June 2024 (see
> https://mariadb.com/kb/en/new-and-old-releases/)

I just checked out the 10.5 branch of Mariadb and it looks like the 
embedded server is still present there.

> I wonder if Amarok could release a version with dependency to Mariadb
> <= 10.4. Then we prioritize the port to the alternative to
> mariadb/mysql. This would bridge the 2-year gap from the previous
> release. Also it would bring Amarok back to distros that are not
> shipping it because it doesn't have an official KF5 versions (namely
> Ubuntu).

I think there's no need to declare such a dep on our side at the moment. It 
sufficient to check if it's present or not in our cmake code, which we 
already do.

Regards,
Heiko

[1] 
https://cgit.kde.org/plasma-workspace.git/commit/?id=605fb9acd867e22e171184a08d9dfd2d1d4e893e