[gentoo-dev] cdparanoia and libcdio

[Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò]

Hi,
Ok this was in mind for a bit of time and maybe now is the right moment to 
bring this up..
Cdparanoia [1] is a command line tool + libraries that allows to play cd 
audio.
Currently cdparanoia seems to be dead upstream, and we have had couple of bugs 
before. It also doesn't work out of the box on Gentoo/FreeBSD.

On the other hand, libcdio is a live project that provide a 
cdparanoia-compatible interface, both as command line tool and as libraries 
that can be easily used instead of cdparanoia.

Was already discussed to move libcdio's cdparanoia as the default, but carlo 
suggested to do so in a new cdparanoia ebuild, and I don't really think it's 
the case to remove cdparanoia from libcdio ebuild and add a new ebuild with a 
fake version number to have compatibility with dependencies.. yes it's less 
work, but it's an hack that will make maintaining it an hell.
Also because they don't use the same library names: libcdda_interface (from 
cdparanoia) is libcdio_cdda (in libcdio), while libcdda_paranoia is 
libcdio_paranoia.
I'm not sure about binary compatibility, but it should be safe with source 
compatibility... but also this needs to be checked.

My solution would be that: make cdparanoia block a new revision of libcdio 
(masked for a bit, but devs *please unmask it*), see which dependencies are 
broken, patch the software to link to libcdio if cdparanoia is missing, and 
change their dependency to an || ( libcdio cdparanoia ).
When nothing depends only on cdparanoia, we can phase it out.

It would be probably a great  work, while probably most of it it's in sound 
ebuilds (that I can tackle myself), what I"m asking here involves certainly 
also gstreamer herd, and I'm not sure if there are other packages not in 
sound or video that uses cdparanoia.

Comments?

[1] http://www.xiph.org/paranoia/
-- 
Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò
Gentoo Developer - http://dev.gentoo.org/~flameeyes/
(Gentoo/FreeBSD, Video, Gentoo/AMD64, Sound, PAM)