Package: amarok 2.4beta1 for Debian testing

Amarok is a nice music player for KDE. Inspired by iTunes interface, it features a clever random mode, provides Wikipedia/lyrics/photos pages for the currently played song, handles mtp devices and works with lastfm so you can have online stats of what you listen to and find people that listen to the same crap too. That’s definitely a nice software. But, unfortunately, it’s quite buggy.

This morning, Amarok would not start, no matter what. Well, it’s started once I erased .kde/share/config/amarok and .kde/share/apps/amarok. Then, shortly afterwards, it failed to start once more. I’m not quite frankly prepared to remove my Amarok config twice per day. So I decided I would just give a shot to a more recent version and the first beta for 2.4 around seemed a good pick.

Here’s amarok 2.4beta1 (2.3.90) packages for Debian testing amd64.

It was built with amarok Debian experimental directory (a new entry added in debian/changelog, usr/share/doc/kde/HTML/* removed from debian/amarok-common.install, usr/lib/strigi* removed from debian/amarok.install, usr/lib/kde4/*.so and usr/lib/*.so* added to debian/amarok.install, target override_dh_shlibdeps: added to debian/rules and all patches removed from debian/patches/series) and amarok official latest source package (renamed amarok_2.3.90.orig.tar.bz2) using the command dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot inside the amarok-2.3.90 directory (source tarball decompressed) containing also the debian directory.

Keeping the dpkg installed software database clean

The system on my workstation was installed in 2008, December. Actually, I installed Debian AMD64 version over an i386 version on the same box, which was installed around 2003.

Debian ships tools that makes it easy to keep a clean system. For instance, debfoster allows to easily get rid of all no-longer necessary libraries and al: you just have to select the important pieces and it will remove any software that is not required by one of these. And apt-get, nowadays, just like deborphan used to, even warns you when some software is no longer required and provides you with the autoremove command line argument that do the job automatically.

(debfoster is, supposedly, deprecated, like apt-get is in favor of aptitude. Well, I like debfoster)

That being said, if I run dpkg --list | grep ^r | nl | tail -n 1 on this box, after only one year, I get 617 lines about removed software I do not care about. Mostly, they were kept in the dpkg database because I (or me using the system) modified their conffiles. The following will clean this: for package in `dpkg --list | grep ^r | cut -f 3 -d " "`; do dpkg --purge $package; done && debfoster