Splitting out the taglib plugins?

[Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò]

Hi everybody. For the ones of you that I don't annoy from time to time on IRC, 
I'm the Gentoo packager for Amarok.

I was wondering how everybody felt about releasing the TagLib plugins on their 
own. Let's me explain. I'm working on TagLib bindings for Ruby 
(RubyTag++[1]), and although I'm mostly waiting now for upstream TagLib to 
fix a few bugs that I end up discovering on my testsuite, I'd like to able to 
handle also AAC/M4A files and WMA, mainly because of the second stage of my 
project ;)

Basically after RubyTag++ works decently, I'm going to return to the work on 
JulTagger, a Korundum(Ruby)-based audio file tagger for KDE.

The problem is that as long as the plugins are internal to Amarok code, it's 
not possible to use them in other software. The first solution would be to 
take the code as it is, and package it in its own tarball, as eean already 
suggested. This would work for the Amarok part, but would be a bit un-optimal 
for other situations. The code would be duplicated once compiled, it will 
still enlarge compile time for Amarok, and it will be difficult to get them 
correctly in sync.

What I tried to propose (but of course I don't count on), is to have those 
TagLib plugins in their own repository, with a clean build system (not 
KDE-based to avoid depending on it and turning away extra projects interested 
in them, I would say simple plain autotools correctly used or cmake proper), 
so that they can be used by other projects to complement TagLib itself.

If the extra dependency would be a problem for Amarok packaging (although as 
long as the packagers know how they should work this shouldn't be an issue), 
it would be possible to have an internal copy of the plugins enabled by 
default, and a hidden, commented switch to use the external copy of them, so 
that for instance source-based distribution (like Gentoo, but I would suppose 
also FreeBSD's ports, and similar) would be able to use the proper extra 
package.

Thoughts, comments? (Please CC me as I'm not subscribed to the list)

[1] http://flameeyes.is-a-geek.org/projects#rubytag++
-- 
Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò - http://farragut.flameeyes.is-a-geek.org/
Gentoo/Alt lead, Gentoo/FreeBSD, Video, AMD64, Sound, PAM, KDE
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