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It’s not like I think other distribution sucks but…

… at least some of their maintainers (official or not) don’t care much about users, or simply don’t know how to care.

I’m not saying that just because I’m a “Gentoo or nothing” kind of person, but simply because I have now the evidence that a good deal of other distributions’ maintainers simply don’t care about their users.

I’m not even sure if they are all official maintainers or there are also unofficial maintainers involved, but this whole situation makes me laugh.

So, Amarok 1.4.1 was released, and this one checks if xine-lib supports the stream type before playing, so that it does not crash on unknown streams. Good thing. Too bad that xine-lib 1.1.1 has a bug in the FLAC demuxer that make it tell Amarok there’s no audio stream available, so that it refused to play the FLAC files.

The problem is annoying, albeit not a great loss for many people who don’t care about open formats and music quality, but there are people using FLAC files (I’m one of them), and for them it’s a big loss.

So what the deal is? On Gentoo, I was able to get the fixed xine-lib stable altogether with a security fix, so I just had to make Amarok depend on that version to force upgrade for the few who don’t run full updates, and this is good. For everyone else, I sent to the amarok-packagers list a note about the need for the patch, the actual patch, and told that 1.1.2 version of xine-lib will be released already fixed.

Now it seems that unofficial packagers did package Amarok 1.4.1 for various distributions without supplying a properly patched xine-lib, and maybe some official packager did too, this is out of my sight, but the problem remain: seems like really few distributions actually care about their users :/

Oh well, something Gentoo users has not to worry about is to have a working xine 😛 Of course if they know how to set useflags.

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