Dependency Updates for TagLib and TagLib-Extras

[Tycho Andersen]

On Sat, 19 Sep 2009, Jeff Mitchell wrote:

> Tycho Andersen wrote:
>> On Thu, 17 Sep 2009, Jeff Mitchell wrote:
>>
>>> Jeff Mitchell wrote:
>>>> 3) TagLib source is available at
>>>> http://developer.kde.org/~wheeler/files/src/taglib-1.6.tar.gz ...
>>>> installing from source to /usr/local is simple, and it is easy to remove
>>>> later. Be sure to compile in support for MP4/ASF.
>>> Note: to compile taglib with these options, simply specify -DWITH_ASF=On
>>> -DWITH_MP4=On when running cmake.
>>
>> Maybe I'm missing something, but is it really necessary that these are compiled
>> in? Suppose I don't have any .asf or .mp4 files, and I compile TagLib without
>> that support, why should cmake bomb?
>
> Tycho,
>
> Amarok has *always* had support for those formats, even if you didn't
> realize it. In the beginning(TM) Amarok had a number of TagLib plugins
> (including ASF and MP4) that lived inside its source tree and were
> installed with Amarok, and were in that sense mandatory.
>
> These were then split out to TagLib-Extras, so that if other projects
> wanted to take advantage of them they could. But Taglib-Extras was a
> required dependency of Amarok, so that the format support would stay.

Ah hah, so I was missing something ;-)

> Now that those formats live in TagLib prpoer, we're happy to drop
> support from TagLib-Extras (it's the same codebase), but the TagLib guys
> made somewhat of a mistake in making those optional due to very outdated
> requests from some distribution packagers (who have since dispensed of
> any objection). All of the multiple other formats TagLib supports are
> not optional -- I don't have any WavPack files, or Ogg/FLAC files, or
> APE files, but I still have support for them in TagLib. There isn't
> really any reason that ASF and MP4 should be treated differently, and it
> makes our lives much harder if some distro packages have support and
> some don't, leading to different experiences and behavior of Amarok on
> different distros.
>
> So, making it mandatory is as much a way of making sure that the distros
> properly package TagLib as anything else. Even if you don't need them
> specifically, at the same time it's not exactly a hardship to enable
> them -- and I'm guessing you don't need some of the other formats TagLib
> supports either, so I don't see why there should be any concern over
> enabling these.

No concern, I was just curious. This seems like a valid explanation, thanks for
the info!

\t