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

[Akkana Peck]

Tom Ashcraft writes:
> 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.

Hooray! And I love your idea of doing it on a USB stick that can be
moved between machines. Great idea.

> 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. 

That's very common, alas. So many packages either require special
libraries not in Debian, or require the cutting edge git versions
built from source rather than the old stable versions in
Debian/Ubuntu.

> 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.

That's a good idea and you'll learn a lot. It might turn out to be
easy, or it might be hard; depends on how Clementine's code is
organized. But definitely worth trying!

I have an old talk that might help, called "Bug Fixing for Everybody
(even if you're not a programmer!)" I first wrote it in 2007 and
presented a longer version at several conferences in 2009. But
really, not much has changed in the basics of how you go about
fixing a bug in unfamiliar software. There's a link to the slides
(online in HTML format; the stuff on the far right is my speaker
notes), and a handout that summarizes them.
http://shallowsky.com/bugfixing/

        ...Akkana