extragear/multimedia/amarok

Ian Monroe ian.monroe at gmail.com
Thu Mar 19 20:24:36 CET 2009


On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 2:18 PM, Dan Meltzer
<parallelgrapefruit at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 3:11 PM, Ian Monroe <ian.monroe at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 1:44 PM, Dan Meltzer
>> <parallelgrapefruit at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 11:16 AM, Jeff Mitchell <mitchell at kde.org> wrote:
>>>> Dan Meltzer wrote:
>>>>> Why in the world is it required? Aren't they all primaraly esoteric formats?
>>>>
>>>> MP4 and WMA?  No, they're pretty widely used.
>>>
>>> (ccing the list as I still think this merits discussion...)
>>>
>>> While it's true that mp4 and wma's are fairly common music formats, I
>>> think that the amount of people that do not have them (and use amarok)
>>> is much greater than the amount of people that do.  These plugins are
>>> nice and useful, but there is no reason they need to be installed to
>>> have a functioning amarok (which is what this commit is saying.)  We
>>> can strongly suggest it being installed, but I do not see much of a
>>> reason why it _must_ be installed to use Amarok, I personally get no
>>> benefit from mp4 and wma tag reading, and I have to assume that there
>>> are a lot of people out there in the same position.  These plugins
>>> have also shown to have security issues in the past, and have not been
>>> audited as well as the ones in taglib proper, I believe.
>>>
>>> Dan,
>>
>> Well you know what its all about, feel free to patch it out.
>
> Sure, but then I have to make sure I'm not accidentally committing
> this every single time I make a commit...
>>
>> Cause what this is saying is that distros must required taglib-extras.
>> They obviously can patch it out if they want, but they know they're
>> doing something naughty if they do that.
>
> Yes, but it's not saying why.  There is no reason why amarok cannot
> run perfectly fine without support for mp4 and wma files.

No it doesn't run perfectly fine without them. Amarok has WMA and MP4
tag support. If these don't work, then something is wrong. And its
easy to see a scenario where some user caught in the middle can't
build their collection.

>>
>> And general use packages should require it.
>
> See above.
>>
>> Anyways Dan, these plugins have been built into Amarok for years
>> (since like Amarok 1.3 or something, earlier?) I don't get why just
>> making it a different package magically transforms it into a
>> potentially onerous dependency.
>
> It's not a potentially onerous dependancy, but, now that it's been
> separated, theres no reason not to allow it to be optional.  This is
> going to explicitly break everyone that builds from svn (they now need
> to locate and build taglib-extras) and it becomes yet another step in
> the amarok building process.  It's also another release to coordinate,
> and more code to keep track of.  What it comes down to is the fact
> that these packages are optional.  Solving a social problem (packagers
> making a decision) via technical means (skewing the definition of
> required) is not a great way to do things.

Well the problem I thought it solved was letting other applications
use taglib-extras, so we can have all that FOSS love.

Ian


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