amarok missing dependance on "phonon-backend-xine"

[locketine]

After doing an update from Intrepid to Jaunty I discovered Amarok 2.0 couldn't play music because of a "device failure" as Amarok put it. To fix this problem all I had to do was install the package "phonon-backend-xine".

[Jonathan Thomas (echidnaman)]

Technically the gstreamer backend can be used too, but it doesn't work great. Amarok's depends are proper here.

[locketine (locketine)]

Strange, Amarok 1.4x does not allow you to use the gstreamer backend. if you are correct that it can use multiple backend packages, an application that is designed to play music should be installed in such a way that it does indeed play music so the package maintainer should pick a package if multiple are available.

I do not know how the package dependency system is set up but maybe in a case like this it would be nice to allow the maintainer to specify a list of recommended backends and the package installer would install the first one in the list if none were installed already.

[Peter Schüller (schueller-p)]

In my opinion all backends should use the "provide" field for some feature, something like "audio-streamer-backend" and Amarok should require this feature.

Then you get a message similar to: "unmet dependencies audio-streamer-backend, the following packages provide this feature: ..."

Perhaps it is already solved this way, the problem is, that amarok and gstreamer is incompatible, so something should be fixed.