Why is lastfm a required dependency?

[Ian Monroe]

On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 7:17 PM, Orville Bennett<illogical1 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Ian Monroe wrote:
>> On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 4:22 PM, Modestas Vainius<modestas at vainius.eu>  wrote:
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> On 2009 m. June 22 d., Monday 23:51:03 Leo Franchi wrote:
>>>
>>>> Your replies in the email were against the argument for/against
>>>> liblastfm being a required dependency, but that is not what I was
>>>> responding to. I was replying to your complaint that amarok "attracts
>>>> many exotic required dependencies"---just to explain how I don't think
>>>> liblastfm is very exotic at all (it just is right right now because
>>>> we're early).
>>> MySQLe - still exotic, but I can understand why it is required (at least at
>>> the moment). ok.
>>> QtScriptGenerator - exotic (and really PITA), but I still understand why it is
>>> required (and no, it being embedded in Amarok source wasn't any better).
>>> Last.fm - exotic and I do not understand why it is required. Even when
>>> official last.fm player uses it, it will still be exotic.
>>>
>>> The more amarok is easy to build, the more users will test it. Even if a
>>> distro shipped Amarok beta without last.fm, why would you be angry about it?
>>> Do you want testers or not? Or do you want to push last.fm? Sorry for being
>>> rude, but it was not the first time I heard that packagers argument and I was
>>> ignored numerous times. At least somebody is trying to discuss now.
>>
>> I'd rather have less testers but also less threads like "why isn't
>> Amarok scrobbling anymore" and "what happened to last.fm".
>>
>> Making it 'optional' implies that someone gets a choice, in reality
>> the person presented with the choice is the packager and not the user.
>> Even if there's a separate package there's usually no clear way to
>> inform users that they are missing out on a feature or a trivial way
>> to install it. There's a lot reasons to just have it by default.
>>
>> So in practice "optional" means non-existent for some users,
> Some. Not all or even most. And first and foremost, that probably should
> be solved by dialog with packagers/distros before more drastic measures
> are taken.

What would this dialog with packagers achieve? Distros do have special
ways to say "hey, your trying to play MP3, but you need to download
some more packages to do that, click here and I'll do it
automatically". This is a special case though. There isn't a context
where such a dialog would make sense for audioscrobbler and there's no
proposal to do anything like it.

For most users if lastfm is packaged separately in an optional package
or not packaged at all, it becomes as much a part of Amarok's
functionality as making breakfast.

(and as far as distro communication, lfranchi let them know months ago
this was coming up IIRC)

>> especially for those who use distros which have a "COMPILE->SHIPIT"
>> mentality. Just stating that you're not one of these packagers (which
>> we appreciate!) doesn't make them go away. :)
> Still weak reasoning. Those distros have a choice, as well as those
> users. If they really want to make optional dependencies optional, is it
> worth pissing off the rest of your packagers to fix this?
> Seems a bit drastic to me.

The distros have a choice to confuse our users by removing a feature
they're used to? Well of course they do, but we would rather they not
exercise the choice.

And its actually trivial with .deb and .rpm and so forth to make
several packages from the same source tarball (and this isn't uncommon
at all), nothing we do in our CMakeLists.txt could hinder this.

Ian