transKode

[Sergio Pistone]

Hi, my name is Sergio Pistone, and I'm the author of transKode, one of the scripts that can be used to transcode file to audio devices (at least in the 1.4.x branch, I don't know if things will work the same way for the 2.x release).
Anyway, the reason I write is because, until now, I had been distributing the script as a binary package but the last release proved to be a royal pain in the butt... I don't know why, but this time I stumbled upon many (too many) dependencies issues and problems trying to build a package that could actually run on most common distros, something I could only (kind of) workout by setting up a bare bones Gentoo installation and building the package there (which, as you can probably guess, involved a significant amount of pain). All this got me thinking about the viability of this approach and lead me to the obvious conclusion: it sucks. It's not only the different dependencies problem but also the fact that different packages need to be distributed for each platform: currently only 32bit Linux is "supported" this way, which also sucks because back in 2005, when transKode was born, 32 bits was the reasonable choice for a binary package but not so much
 anymore (and yet, 64bits is not as common as to switch to a 64bits binary) and also because Amarok runs (or will run) in a lot more OSs than Linux.
I've been thinking about ways to overcome this but they all suck one way or another: one involved distributing a script that would dynamically detect the platform and download the right package (but still required someone building the packages...), the other one was rewriting everything in Ruby or Python (but besides the obvious pain in porting from c++, it would need to depend on both Qt and KDE bindings).
Now, if anyone read this far, it's probably wandering why the long introduction... The reason is that I'd like to see the transKode script be distributed directly with Amarok. I'm not suggesting any core changes to Amarok, just to include it as with the other included scripts. This way the packaging problems would be automatically solved by the distros which already package Amarok. 
What do you guys think? Is there any interest in this? I know it's a bit early as transKode hasn't even been ported to Qt4/KDE4 and Amarok 2 is not released (and again, I don't even know if scripts will continue to work the way they do now) but it seemed like a good moment to ask...





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