After another long season without any blog entries, I’m here to write about the recently added to the tree media-sound/amarok-2.3.1-r1 ebuild.
This masked ebuild merges the amarok/amarok-utils features again. The features of the old ebuilds are set by the player and utils use flags. The ebuild has both enabled by default and will force the use of the player use flag if the utils use flag is disabled.
I’ve taken this chance to add the dependency support for the dev-db/mariadb package, but I haven’t tested it myself yet. This fixes bug 320807. I’ve also added a patch that should fix the requirement to build x11-libs/qt-gui and x11-libs/qt-qt3support with the accessibility use flag – bug 319803. I’ve also appended the minimal-toc flag to see if amarok will build for ppc64 and let us finally close bug 280552.
I’m going to drop most of the old amarok/amarok-utils ebuilds from the tree and plan to ask for amarok-2.3.1-r1 to be marked stable very soon.
A very important point for anyone running the stable ebuild is that since amarok-2.3.0.90, the embedded use flag was dropped from IUSE defaults, which means that unless you activate it explicitly, amarok won’t use or support libmysqld (the mysql embedded server). This change is the consequence of the substantial changes from the mysql-5.0 to mysql-5.1 source code, that broke our libmysqld shared patch work – bug 238847. At this time we haven’t been able to port our old patch to mysql-5.1 yet. The work on this can be tracked on bug 306315. Because amarok[embedded] will force the use of mysql-5.0 and thus a downgrade from mysql-5.1, I won’t add the embedded use flag to IUSE defaults until the port is complete – any help on the porting is most welcomed. You can read more about the consequences of this change and why it was done in bug 310897.
If downgrading to mysql-5.0 is not an option for you, all you need is to configure amarok to use the external mysql database. Please read the amarok WIKI for details on how to configure the external db and migrate your data from the embedded database. The ebuild notifies you about this in the pkg_postinst warnings if you don’t activate the embedded use flag.