State of Audio CD support in KDE

[Boudhayan Gupta]

Hi all,

In porting libKCompactDisc from kdelibs4 to kf5 I've discovered that
libKCompactDisc doesn't actually work, in that it can neither detect
an audio CD in the drive nor play it.

Further, looking at the code of other KDE projects I've discovered no
one actually uses libKCompactDisc to play audio CDs. We have:

*audiocd-kio, which uses the library to get the number of tracks in the disc.
*audex, which just crashes (it uses the library to get a list of CD
drives, apparently).
*kaudiocreator depends on it, but lxr doesn't show any usage of
"KCompactDisc" in it.
*kscd doesn't use it anymore.

In all, KCompactDisc hasn't probably worked for years and no one's
noticed because no one's been using it.

In terms of support for Audio CDs in KDE,

* K3B can write them.
* Phonon the API can play them, with some minor but weird bugs.

And that's it.

I think we need to take a long hard look at the state of support for
Red Book CDs in KDE and decide:

a) Do we still want to support them, and
b) If yes, to what degree do we support them?

Based on that, I'll decide whether and how to kill/repurpose/fix
KCompactDisc and other apps which work with it.

Cheers,
Boudhayan Gupta