[Fwd: Re: Support "album artist" and "artist sort" in TagLib::Tag interface?]

[Scott Wheeler]

On Jan 11, 2009, at 9:59 PM, Jeff Mitchell wrote:
>
> Perhaps.  I talked to him recently about releasing an update, since  
> when
> he released 1.5 in January he pledged more frequent updating.  The
> answer I got was basically "I'm totally swamped right now and have no
> time to validate all of the changes".
>
> When he releases, he goes through all the patches that have been
> submitted and bugs that have been opened and inspects the former and
> closes the latter.  This takes a decent amount of time.  I'm not sure
> that we could help with a speedup on development unless he trusts us
> enough to do this process for him (or not necessarily even a matter of
> trust, but just of willingness).
>
> Rolling our own could also allow us to add patches that do nice  
> things,
> which was my original reason for forwarding this.

Just caught this from a while back (as an occasional reader) -- the  
issue with doing TagLib releases isn't just doing a tar cfz taglib.tgz  
taglib/ -- it's that I audit every change since the last release to  
try to catch bugs.  The reason that tends to matter for TagLib more  
than most projects is that an off by one error in TagLib can destroy  
people's files.  That's not just theory -- there was one beta with a  
patch that I hadn't reviewed that the author apparently had never  
tested and corrupted every single FLAC file that it wrote a tag to.   
Before the 1.5 release the audit did in fact catch several issues.

So when I do a release I first go through all open bugs and apply the  
patches as appropriate then spend pretty much a whole day reading the  
diff.

The reason why it's been difficult to get a release out of late is  
that I started a startup in the middle of last year and am doing 100  
hour work weeks at the moment, so it's tough to squeeze in the three  
days or so of time that I'd need to do a TagLib release.  A 1.6  
release has been staring back at me from my to-do list in red print  
for the last few weeks, so as soon as there are a few days that I can  
pull out to get it done it'll happen.

SongBird's version is a pretty wide fork from the main TagLib source,  
but I'm in regular contact with Peter, the guy that did the changes.   
Them forking was mostly about breaking the ABI more than being able to  
merge in changes as I also got Peter set up with a KDE SVN account  
(though I don't think he's used it yet).  Once 1.6 comes out he's  
planning on folding his changes into mainline which will someday  
become 2.0.

-Scott