Josh Saddler

Even though I'm currently sick with H1N1, also known as swine flu, this morning I was feeling well enough to write an ebuild for an interesting media app I found: Tabu Audio Player. It's an interesting player -- while it still needs some translation work into English, it's simple and has an appealing UI drawn by Cairo.

It had only a single configure option, "debug," and a very short list of dependencies, so I figured it'd be a simple ebuild to write, right?

Wrong! Turns out that after a half-hours' worth of poking at configure.ac, the package's check for --disable-debug/--enable-debug was completely broken. If you explicitly passed --disable-debug, like "-debug" in IUSE, then it would enable the debug build every time. Thanks to rej and a3li on IRC for nailing this problem down; they were really helpful.

a3li also shared his solution for the same problem in one of his packages, so I used it in my ebuild to ensure that "debug" works properly as a USE variable.

Meanwhile, I sent a bug report to upstream asking for a smarter debug check. I also asked for CFLAGS="-02" to be removed from Makefile.am, that way folks are free to use their own -O levels without having to resort to using sed on the Makefile, as I had to in the ebuild.

Speaking of which: I have an ebuild for Tabu 2.1 waiting for you in my devspace, if you'd like to try it out.