So, while I don’t have enough time to blog lately, I’ve been able to squeeze in a few changes to Amarok ebuilds and a few changes to xine-lib too. Let me try to get a little status update.
For what concerns Amarok users in Gentoo, the Live Subversion ebuild is now named with version being 1.4.9999 rather than 9999. This change is to make it clearer which version the Live ebuild is going to build (got a few people asking me lately if the 9999 version was going to install Amarok 2 or Amarok 1.4), and to free the space that should (and maybe will) be of Amarok 2’s live ebuild.
I also added an hard dependency over SQLite 3. Now, I know there are people that will now bitch about this being an extra dependency on Amarok and so on, this always happens. But I have a reason to add such a dependency, let me try to explain.
First of all, even if Amarok has optional support for MySQL and PostgreSQL, the SQLite support is not optional. The idea is that Amarok works out of the box, and neither MySQL nor PostgreSQL allow that, SQLite is the only choice that can be enabled out of the box.
Up to now Amarok built the bundled SQLite, which was the safe solution (even if it caused 1.4.5 to fail on G/FBSD); the reason why I decided for the safe solution before was that SQLite had a bad fame of breaking stuff between releases, and this happened once or twice on other distributions at least; lately the library started being less troublesome though, so the option of using the system copy started to be more interesting.
Another good reason to use the system copy of SQLite, beside policy and security, is the ability to share it between processes using it, saving memory. And one of the most common packages that might be used together with Amarok using SQLite3 is DigiKam. It might sound a bit Apple-istic, but if one of the most common combinations on OSX is iTunes and iPhoto, it might as well be Amarok and DigiKam on KDE, no?
Anyway, this decision was taken together with Markey, so you shouldn’t really start crying, it’s not going to hurt you, you’re not going to build more code (actually, you’ll build less when you update Amarok), and you’re not going to waste more memory (actually you’ll waste way less).
On xine-lib front instead, thanks to Albert Lee, Ben Taylor and Jonathan Wheeler, Solaris support is improving, and I’m trying to get a virtual machine running now (through Virtual Box, like Bernard said too — although I still need vmware-server installed with USB support to eventually update my phone 🙁 ). The virtual machine I need to finish the audio conversion branch by adding support for the new formats to the Sun Audio output.
I’ll also be trying to clean up a few warnings in the code, so that the build is as clean as possible, without going to rewrite all of it. Unfortunately to get xine-lib to build correctly on Solaris, we need to rename BE_ and LE_ macros to something different (like X_BE), which is a nasty thing to commit.
Anyway, time to work.
