Why is lastfm a required dependency?

[Leo Franchi]

On Jun 22, 2009, at 4:11 PM, Modestas Vainius wrote:

> Hello,
>
> On 2009 m. June 22 d., Monday 20:46:56 Andreas Pakulat wrote:
>> 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.
>
> That library seems to have unstable API/ABI and Debian maintainer is  
> having a
> hard time trying to package it right. Some time ago I asked Amarok  
> devs the
> same question as you, and I got an answer like "we want amarok to be  
> the same
> everywhere" or something among those lines. I still disagree with  
> this POV in
> general but I seem to be in minority here. Amarok seems to attract  
> many exotic
> required (which in last.fm case is clearly exaggerated) dependencies  
> like no
> other app but nobody sees that as a problem.

How can it have an unstable API/ABI if there is only 1 release of the  
library?

We are using liblastfm as a dependency because:

a) Building libraries internally is stupid and just leads to bloat
b) Sharing code amongst different system processes is a *good thing*.

The next release of the official last.fm player will also be using  
liblastfm, as will playdar. So this is not a dependency that only  
Amarok will have. This is rather the official c++/qt last.fm wrapper.  
We just happen to be the first to publicly depend on it.

Also, please note that this dependency is for 2.2, which is still  
quite a far ways down the road. So although we are the first to  
publicly depend on it right now, there are still some months to go  
before any released version will.

cheers,
leo