Flipping MP4/ASF default for 1.6.1

Jeff Mitchell mitchell at kde.org
Sat Oct 10 06:35:42 CEST 2009


Lukas,

I saw that you're planning on releasing 1.6.1.

I'd like to request that ASF and MP4 support be turned on by default.

The off-by-default status in 1.6 has caused no end of confusion with
packagers who assume that it's off by default for a good reason. AFAIK,
the reason it was flipped off by default was that a long time ago some
distros (like Fedora) made noises about possible patent issues. Since
these same distributions had been carrying the same code in Amarok for
years, it was silly to begin with; but again AFAIK, these have been
resolved to the satisfaction of all of the distros that made those
requests (I know Fedora legal decided it was OK), and all major distros
have ASF and MP4 support turned on. We Amarok guys have specifically
forced this on the distros for consistency's sake, so that users in
various distros don't wonder why the guy next to them can see metadata
of MP4 files and they can't.

For users building from source, we get lots of confusion from users that
didn't realize they had to toggle these on, and lots of questions like
"I don't have ASF files, why do I need to build in support into TagLib?"
The same users generally don't have APE or MPC or Speex files either,
but they don't ask that question because those aren't formats they
specifically have to enable.

All in all, having those formats be optional and off by default is just
causing lots of confusion. I'd prefer they not be optional at all, since
the rest of the formats in TagLib aren't optional (and none of them
would be that hard to patch out for some hardcore distro); but
otherwise, please make them on-by-default.

Thanks,
Jeff

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