And How Open Source Sucks Sometimes

Wednesday, August 9. 2006

And How Open Source Sucks Sometimes

Quality control I imagine is always a difficult issue. Even when you control the binaries, software isn't always going to act the same on all systems. However the problem is exasperated when all that is released is a tarball, like we do with Amarok. For instance, we decided to remove the gstreamer 0.10 engine. It has several open bugs and its maintainer (Paul) would be the first to say its not ready yet.

So we removed it from the build system Makefile.am and commented it out of the configure.in.in. But apparently despite our best effort to release a quality project, we recently discovered that Fedora went behind our back and re-enabled the gstreamer 0.10 engine for their amd64 builds. Remember, this engine has never been part of a stable build. And then our users come to us wondering why stuff doesn't work... they generally don't like being told its because their distro is silly. :/

Posted by Ian Monroe in eean at 04:40 | Comments (5) | Trackbacks (0)

Trackbacks

Trackback specific URI for this entry

No Trackbacks

Comments

Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

actually we completely removed gstreamer, I think it only shows up in configure.in.in, and that's it.

So one needs to patch the whole engine into the sources and then modify some files to get it build at all. Really not that one could get the idea that we have a reason for this.

#1 apachelogger on 2006-08-09 07:17 (Reply)

Yeah Fedora goes kind of nuts once they get an idea into their head, in this case gstreamer. rhythmbox uses it. I'm guessing it was a bit like "oh, they have gstreamer code in a patch somewhere? let's enable it!" The build process does start from the release tarball though, it's simple to disable.

From a Fedora user who's fine with using Amarok with xine, or whatever works.

#2 John (Homepage) on 2006-08-15 09:18 (Reply)

Fedora Core should die already. It's a string of bad decisions on top of other bad decisions. They constantly create major screwups by deliberately enabling ultra-experimental stuff and apparently never learn from it. I really wish people would stop using this garbage of a distribution.

#3 Simon Roby on 2006-08-17 22:32 (Reply)

Ripping out gstreamer from Amarok has caused a problem that you probably haven't accounted for.

Because of the Debian-like policies at Fedora, they cannot ship builds which include encumbered components, and apparently xine is such a component, so that rules out shipping Amarok linked against xine.

AFAIK Helix will not build on x86_64, so that just leaves gstreamer as a candidate for Amarok on x86_64 ... either that or leave a gaping hole in the x86_64 repo where Amarok used to be.

Bear in mind, probably all FC5 Amarok users switch to the xine engine (provided in the Livna repo as "amarok-extras-nonfree") immediately after installing, so gstreamer "beta" issues should rarely arise. IOW, from the POV of x86_64 users it is irrelevant whether a build ... any build is linked against a "buggy beta" engine or not, so long as a build is possible, so they can subsequently plug in a separately distributed (non-free) engine.

By exerting pressure on the Fedora maintainer to not build against gstreamer, that effectively leaves FC5 x86_64 users out in the cold, with no Amarok.

To quote from the RPM spec file:

"# On those archs, there is no engine
# (Helix is unavailable, gstreamer is in beta, xine is encumbered)
ExcludeArch: ppc64 s390 x86_64 s390x ia64"

So on behalf of all FC5 x86_64 users, I'd just like to say "thanks".

PS: can you confirm what license you are distributing Amarok under, because I can't seem to find the section in the GPL that states you can force people not to link it against other GPL software.

#4 Keith G. Robertson-Turner (Homepage) on 2006-10-22 19:19 (Reply)

What does "encumbered" mean? And we don't care if you link to gstreamer from a licensing point of view, but rather from a "alpha-software" point of view.

#4.1 sebr (Homepage) on 2006-10-25 17:59 (Reply)

Add Comment

Name
Email
Homepage
In reply to
Comment	Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (word), underscore are made via _word_. Standard emoticons like :-) and ;-) are converted to images. To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly. Enter the string from the spam-prevention image above:
	Remember Information? Subscribe to this entry