Howdy guys. Sorry for the crosspost. Patch to speed up taglib.

[Jeff Mitchell]

On Thursday 11 October 2007, Scott Wheeler wrote:
> Jeff Mitchell wrote:
> > [...] And no distro that I know of is going to make a taglib
> > snapshot with such a patch that would be used for Amarok 1.4.x.  Despite
> > our strong advice, half of them seem to still be using the official 1.4
> > tarball.
>
> Small note here -- I don't know what the Amarok 2.x release schedule is
> like, but TagLib 1.5 (or 1.4.1 -- once I look at the diff I'll decide
> the appropriate version number) will finally, seriously, be pushed out
> the door in the next week or two.  I finally decided to just go
> bugger-all on it and release more or less what's in SVN, since while I
> often manage to review a handful of patches at a time and commit some as
> appropriate, finding the time to really go through all of the
> outstanding patches just isn't happening right now.
>
> I'll try to test this patch before I do the tarball, but honestly,
> unless the improvements are dramatic I'll probably leave it out.  I just
> finally got my Linux box working again (OpenSUSE 10.2 put it completely
> out of use for the last two months -- something in the USB keyboard
> driver there caused the keyboard to stop working every couple of minutes.)
>
> The one final thing that I was waiting on, and just got the last
> confirmation for yesterday was the switch to a dual LGPL / MPL for the
> next release.  If I have time this weekend I'll push out the release.
> As for how it affects Amarok, since TagLib is API / ABI stable, it's
> just a question if the next round of distros will ship Amarok 1.x or
> 2.x.  The next TagLib version wouldn't even require Amarok to be
> relinked.  (As has been true since 1.0.)
>
> -Scott

Scott--

Awesome.  It is unfortunately very difficult to persuade some distributions to 
package SVN snapshots instead of 1.4 tarball, and we all know that there have 
been tons of improvements, bugfixes, etc since then.  (In fact, until fairly 
recently, we'd still see people with distributions on 1.3.1).

Perhaps in the future as you get through chunks of patches and bugs but not 
necessarily all, you can roll out incremental releases more quickly.  I know 
that you like to make sure everything is tidied up and taken care of before 
releasing, but in the meantime, bugs that have been fixed for a long time in 
SVN still bite us, because distros like to package official tarballs, not 
snapshots.  So maybe this could be 1.5, and as you get through more of the 
bugs/patches in your backlog, they could become 1.5.1, 1.5.2...

I do understand that there are some drawbacks in the form of keeping various 
API versions online on your website (unless you remove old ones), etc.  But 
most packagers are quite happy to package a new official release of a small 
library like taglib once a month or once every few months, when they're not 
at all happy to package SVN snapshots even if the last release hasn't been 
for years.

Looking forward to 1.5  :-)

--Jeff