Amarok Autopackage

[Ian Monroe]

On 11/3/06, Taj Morton <tajmorton at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey Guys,
> Thanks for your work on Amarok--it's a great music player!
>
> I'm emailing just to let you know that I've made Autopackages of Amarok 1.4.4
> and its deps (taglib, tunepimp, musicbrainz, and libofa). For those of you who
> don't know what Autopackage (http://autopackage.org) is, it's a distro-neutral
> packaging system designed to make it easy to install software on Linux. It also
> works around binary compatibility problems like C++ ABI differences and linking
> X libs statically.
>
> You can download the Amarok 1.4.4 autopackage from
> http://www.wildgardenseed.com/Taj/autopackage/amarok/amarok/Amarok%20Audio%20Player%201.4.4.package
>
> To install it, just make it executable and run it. Unless you already have
> Autopackage 1.2 on your system, the package will download and install the
> autopackage support code, and then install Amarok and its dependencies. If
> Amarok is already installed via RPM into the same place where the Autopackage
> will be installed (kde-config --prefix), and you're installing as root, then the
> RPM will automatically be removed.
>
> I made 2 patches to Amarok for the Autopackage:
> 1. http://www.wildgardenseed.com/Taj/autopackage/amarok/amarok/loader.patch
> This patch forces amarok to run the amarokapp installed in the same location as
> the amarok binary. I had to do this because if Amarok is installed into a place
> which isn't in the $PATH yet (e.g., installed as user), then amarok will give
> the error "couldn't find amarokapp". If /proc/self/exe can't be read, then it
> falls back to searching PATH.

Couldn't you change the PATH? Or just suggest people add it to the
path and use amarokapp otherwise.

> 2. http://www.wildgardenseed.com/Taj/autopackage/amarok/amarok/xmmswrapper.patch
> Hacks the Makefile and makes automake whine. I had to do this because g++-3.3
> did something weird when compiling xmmswrapper and it wouldn't link properly
> with -O2 or -O1. This patch forces -O0 for xmmswrapper.

We've removed the XMMS wrapper so I guess this is no longer an issue.

> Is this package something you're interested in listing on your downloads page?
> Or, better, maintaining? Creating autopackages is pretty easy (just run
> `makeinstaller`), but the build system will need to have 2 versions of g++
> installed (g++-3.2/3.3 and g++-3.4/4.0) so that Autopackage can install the
> appropriate binary onto the user. However, getting 2 g++s isn't really too
> hard...even if your distro doesn't provide the other version, I found it's
> fairly easy to build gcc/g++ and install it into /opt.

Are there distros worth supporting that still use g++-3.3? My first
reaction is to not worry about it. If anything it seems like
supporting x86-64/x86 at the same time would be more useful. Eg, thats
what I need. :)

> Let me know how it works for you!
> Cheers,
> Taj

But hey, thanks a lot for your work! I'll harass some of the #amarok
folks to try it out and we'll post it on our download page.

Ian Monroe