F-Spot problems

I like taking photos, although I have rarely some nice subjects outside of my garden (since I haven’t travelled a lot before, although I intend to fix this in the next few months, for instance going back to London and somewhere else too). Since most of the photos I take I want to be seen by friends and family, I resolved some time ago into publishing all of them on flickr with the pro-account, without upload limits and with full-size photos available as well.

I don’t want to go on with explaining why I prefer flickr to Picasa, let’s just leave it to the fact that I can interface to flickr with XSLT without having to implement the GData protocol, okay?

You might then expect that I was pretty upset when, after upgrading to F-Spot 0.6.1.1 I didn’t find the option to upload photos to flickr (in the mean time, even Apple’s iPhoto gained that feature!). Turns out that the problem wasn’t really F-spot’s but rather a problem with the patch, applied in Gentoo, to “fix” parallel build (in truth, it was just a hack to provide some serialisation to avoid breaking when using parallel make).

So indeed I was able to fix the Flickr exporter in 0.6.1.1-r1 and that was it: it used a system copy of the FlickrNet .NET library that was used by the exporter, instead of building and using the internal copy, so the keywords were dropped, but in the end it worked fine.

But the way I did the “fix” in Gentoo was as much as a hack as the original “parallel make fix”, so I wanted to rewrite it properly for upstream, by giving them something that merged directly, and could be really used. When I started doing so, I finally found what broke: the original “fix” stopped make from recursing into the bundled libraries’ directories on all targets, included clean and, more importantly for us, install. So the libraries were built but not installed, and that was our original problem.

The final problem, instead, is that F-Spot bundles libraries! FlickrNet is one of those, but there seem to be more, including Mono.Addins (which is already in the tree by the way), and gnome-keyring-sharp (also). And as usual, this is a violation of Gentoo policy; bug #284732 was filed, and I’ll try to work on it when I have some time; but before doing that I have to hope that upstream will accept the changes I made up to now, I would rather not do the work if upstream is going to reject it.

If you’re interested to see what I changed, or you’re an F-Spot developer that arrived on my blog, you find my changes in my git repository which is available on this server.