Yay! Ubuntu patches my code horribly wrong!

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Ubuntu’s audio team has patched my code using a “new approach” to make audacious use Pulse by default! Great right

Well, not really, because the way they do it is wrong and won’t work and is prone to breakage with future releases.

Here’s the patch:

@DPATCH@
diff -urNad audacious-1.5.0~/src/audacious/main.c audacious-1.5.0/src/audacious/main.c
--- audacious-1.5.0~/src/audacious/main.c       2008-03-13 17:19:27.000000000 -0500
+++ audacious-1.5.0/src/audacious/main.c        2008-03-14 12:38:13.000000000 -0500
@@ -174,7 +174,7 @@
{0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0,             /* equalizer bands */
0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0},
1.2,                        /* GUI scale factor, hardcoded for testing purposes --majeru */
"/usr/share/audacious/Skins/Classic1.3",                       /* skin */
-    NULL,                       /* output plugin */
+    "/usr/lib/audacious/Output/pulse_audio.so (#0)",                       /* output plugin */
NULL,                       /* file selector path */
NULL,                       /* playlist path */

As you can see, this patch is wrong. Why? Because:

  • It uses an absolute path, and an absolute plugin UUID.
  • The value will probably be ignored on first run for most people anyway, resulting in it using ALSA.
  • Obviously we can’t support this change upstream, where all of the Ubuntu users come to ask everything anyway.

I like that, as usual, upstream was not consulted or asked in any way about how to go about making it do what they want. While my first try was wrong, it’s actually wrong due to a bug in audacious; that is the way they should patch it, and they should switch back to my patch in 1.5.1, as the weighted plugin detection is fixed there*.

*On my branch only. Which i will be pushing to proposed/audacious-1.5 soon enough.

Update: apparently some people took this the wrong way and assumed I was flaming Ubuntu here. Why would I? No, I was ranting about the fact that this guy changed a bug and within minutes uploaded this hideous patch. There wasn’t even realistically time to reply to the bug, nor was the patch posted for any sort of public review before hand. Anyone familiar with audacious’s internals would have immediately recognized that the patch is bogus.