[nmglug] Success, sort of, re Clementine iTunes Search in Debian Buster

[Tom Ashcraft]

In some respects I guess I could call this a case of "be careful what 
you wish for".

Thanks largely to input from Mars and Akkana I was able to succeed in my 
goal of obtaining a build of Clementine in which the Add Podcast > 
iTunes Search functionality works properly.

I thought all I really wanted was to get something relatively 
commonplace to work in the manner it should with respect to particular 
things I happened to have need of.  But now I suspect all the failures 
and unintended consequences endured will eventually prove to be more 
valuable than my initial desired outcome.  I learned a lot of things 
along the way.

I got my head wrapped about about half-way around the apt_preferences 
man page and went through four iterations of attempts to build different 
versions of Clementine from source. The one that finally built to the 
point of completion was the generic current version on git hub.

Apparently the developer has little interest in "the debian way".  Only 
about half the dependencies he listed as required happened to be 
available from Debian repos and installed. Nevertheless, Clementine 
proceeded to build and do everything I currently feel a need to do with it.

A bunch of the streaming services I have little or no interest in don't 
work.  Not that that matters much in any way I can justify. But 
aesthetically, anything sloppy or half-complete hanging around always 
*bugs* me.

Of course the one thing I didn't try yet was to actually completely 
follow through and expand onhttps://wiki.debian.org/BuildingTutorial.  
That is, I didn't try to build the current debian version I was trying 
to replace, the one with the bug, from source and see if I could 
actually try a little to fix it and maybe learn something worthwhile 
about debugging.  That's a subject I know exactly zero about.  So I may 
decide I have to continue and find out.

The thing I definitely did right was to do all my experimenting on a 
live USB installation that I created a few weeks ago with mkusb.  This 
was good because not only is it a really bomb-proof way of sandboxing 
any booby traps, vulnerabilities and non-free blobs, but the USB stick 
also runs on multiple machines and has a large sharable cross-platform 
data partition.  I didn't have to dedicate any disk space and put time 
and effort into creating a virtual machine. (Though that would be a good 
way to do things too.)

Also, now I'm thinking that though it lacks some convenience, I can 
always use any OS on a live USB stick with sharable data partition and a 
sound version of Clementine as a general work-around to satisfy my 
desires, even if I can't completely fix Clementine for my Debian laptops.

But I do think if I can't ever get a Debian version of Clementine to 
work exactly right that I'd like to try a VM headless server and 
lxc/lxd/Docker container as a possible middle way.

If anyone has any thoughts or opinions about any of this please let me know.

Thanks,

Tom