Retired libsidplay in Rawhide
Current situation, F-17:
$ repoquery --whatrequires libsidplay
audacious-plugins-sid-0:3.2.2-1.fc17.x86_64
gstreamer-plugins-ugly-0:0.10.19-1.fc17.i686
gstreamer-plugins-ugly-0:0.10.19-1.fc17.x86_64
libsidplay-devel-0:1.36.60-5.fc17.i686
libsidplay-devel-0:1.36.60-5.fc17.x86_64
ocp-0:0.1.20-8.fc17.1.x86_64
So, only three packages are still using the library:
- audacious-plugins-sid is a fully optional plug-in package
- gstreamer-plugins-ugly is from RPM Fusion Free
- ocp is an ancient audio player from the DOS era [1]
libsidplay v2 has taken over many years ago, but could not and still
cannot be included with Fedora for legal reasons (copyright issues related
to "kernal ROM" and "Microsoft Basic ROM" images). An Audacious
plug-in
using the v2 lib can be provided by a 3rd party repo, too.
There's also a more recent libsidplayfp project, a forked libsidplay2 that
aims at improving the implementation in various ways (e.g. making it
thread-safe). It also cannot be included with Fedora because of the same
ROM image problems.
Those files cannot simply be dropped as they are strictly needed at
run-time. They are essential to the default capabilities of the more
modern libsidplay2 code base. Only theoretically, it would be possible to
modify the implementation and treat the ROM images as optional, but
someone to do that is missing. And without the ROM images, libsidplay2
would be less capable.
And "less capable" here means that a full-featured libsidplay2 is needed
to handle existing files that the old libsidplay v1 cannot handle either.
The file format of those files (an enhanced PSID header) has been
introduced many years ago with libsidplay2. libsidplay v1 cannot and will
not be able to handle those files ever.
Conclusively, IMO it's time to retire libsidplay v1 beginning with
Fedora 18.
[1] "ocp" even has failed to play .sid files 2010-08-20 (bug 625885) and
the bug is still open, as the Fedora package doesn't seem to be
well-maintained enough to merge the upstream fix that has been
announced in that ticket on 2011-11-02. Even a new upstream release has
been made two weeks later.
--
Fedora release 17 (Beefy Miracle) - Linux 3.3.7-1.fc17.x86_64
loadavg: 0.34 0.34 0.39