Why is lastfm a required dependency?

[Leo Franchi]

On Jun 22, 2009, at 3:44 PM, Andreas Pakulat wrote:

> On 22.06.09 14:13:00, Jeff Mitchell wrote:
>> Andreas Pakulat wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I can't find any discussion about making lastfm a required dep and  
>>> it
>>> seems amarok itself builds just fine without it (and is also  
>>> usable for
>>> me without it). Before I go around hunting the library and install  
>>> it
>>> here (as Debian doesn't seem to ship it) I'd like to know the  
>>> reasoning
>>> for making it a hard requirement.
>>
>> FYI, liblastfm used to be bundled within the Amarok source code,  
>> because
>> it was not yet publicly released.  Now that it's publicly released,  
>> it's
>> good practice (just ask your local distro packager) to use distro  
>> packages.
>
> That doesn't answer my question at all. I know that a released lib is
> better than copying its sources into your app, I'd like to know why  
> amarok
> requires lastfm in the first place?

Jeff was just making a note, not trying to answer your question. As to  
a proper reply: I think we need to bring it up for discussion on this  
list. It previously integrated (as last.fm has always been a part of  
amarok) because we couldn't depend on an external library (it didn't  
exist), so in-source was the only way to go. When I switched over to  
making us use the new liblastfm, I made it required just in order to  
keep things as they were. There wasn't a big debate over what to do.  
So, now is a good time for that :)

Pros:
	-> Provides scrobbling, which has always been built-in and users  
might expect to be there.
         -> Provides Dynamic Playlists bias, last.fm service, and (in  
the near future) info in the CV.

Cons:
	-> With the service architecture, making it be a plugin is trivial,  
and users who definitely don't want anything to do with last.fm don't  
have to.
  	-> Packagers not enabling it would royally suck, and needlessly  
remove Amarok functionality.

thoughts?

leo