Why does amarok depend on ASF/MP4 support?

[Maciej Mrozowski]

On Wednesday 30 of September 2009 14:07:27 Andreas Pakulat wrote:

> So I take it that the next taglib release will remove the option or at
> least make it on by default? Or is that something that can't be changed
> anymore?

I really don't see any technical difficulties with them being disabled by 
default. My major concert is:
- KDE devs at least tend to think of enabled by default features as 
recommended, disabled by default like not recommended or testing/experimental 
(like phonon backend for mplayerthumbs)
- disabling by default ASF/MP4 for licensing reasons is clearly deviating from 
'semantics' applied above.

Distro packagers are responsible for reading README's, checking licenses and 
what's the most important - reading buildsystem options. Therefore I don't see 
the point in disabling those features by default just because 'most distros' 
aren't allowed to ship such lib - because those distros should disable it for 
their own.

The problem may be, that this licensing issue has not been clarified enough in 
README's and such. In my opinion enabling as default and showing cmake warning 
that ASF/MP4 support is governed by separate (for instance GPL-incompatible) 
license should make packagers and/or users building taglib from source aware 
enough.

-- 
regards
MM