Yesterday I tried to update the cdparanoia in portage to the newest released version, 3.10_pre0. Unfortunately a) cdparanoia’s versioning scheme is crazy, the tarball is named cdparanoia-III-10_pre0.src.tgz which is, well, pretty much out of any ordering and b) the build system still sucks.
Now, I understand that Xiph did a lot of good for Free Software, with their free formats and their libraries and miscellaneous software, but they really need to start following a course on releasing.
libtheora has an horrible history with releases totally broken that should have been replaced “in a couple of days” and were left behind for months, cdparanoia was left for more than one year or two without releases, and now its latest release sounds like a joke to me, a bad one too.
The configure still use a non-standard name for gnuconfig files (configure.guess and configure.sub rather than config.guess and config.sub) and they weren’t updated, so they don’t recognise AMD64 platform out of the box. The makefiles are the usual mess that has to be fixed for parallel make.
I given up on updating cdparanoia, too much work to do for such a package, I’ll probably be looking for a simple way to make rubyripper use libcdio’s cdparanoia compatible command, and maybe I’ll finally try to make KAudioCreator to link against that rather the original version; this way I might end up without cdparanoia in my system.
On a faintly related note, today I also tried to nail down a xine-lib bug with a Vorbis file encoded with an ancient version of libvorbis; unfortunately I haven’t been able to find the cause yet, but I mostly stopped after two hours of tries because gdb was giving me an hell of an hardtime, and ended up freezing when I tried to put a watchpoint on a raw memory address.
And I think there are still troubles with FLAC 1.1.3 and xine-lib 1.1.3 (that Miguel released yesterday), but I haven’t been able to find a solution with them yet, luckily this is no regression, as FLAC files play fine still (using FFmpeg).
I need longer days (and pleasant nights — dang, I quote the Dark Tower unconsciously).
