[arch-general] libao (and other Xiph package) rebuild schedule?

[Ray Kohler]

A little while back I mentioned here that there were several xiph.org
releases coming up. These did happen, and I flagged those packages out
of date. Now that the openssl, heimdal, and icu updates are done, I'd
like to know where these stand. Normally I'd not write such a "nag
mail", but the only package with a soname bump (libao) is owned by an
ex-developer (Hugo Doria), so I thought it might have been missed. I
also had some extra details to provide.

The full details of the upstream releases can be seen at
http://xiph.org/press/2010/vorbis-surround/ and
http://xiph.org/press/2010/libogg-1.2.0/ . Only libao has a soname
bump; libogg and libvorbis have none. The new vorbis-tools also
requires the new libao. libao isn't widely used, so it shouldn't be
much of a rebuild.

Another thing worth mentioning is that libao now (optionally) supports
many more drivers/plugins out of the box. One of them is pulseaudio.
This likely obsoletes the libao-pulse package currently in community.
The only hassle here is not being able to do a straight split package
since libao is in [extra] and libao-pulse (with pulseaudio itself) is
is in [community]. That said, it should be workable to build the
[extra] package entirely without pulseaudio support, and then build it
again for the [community] package, installing only the pulse plugin
from that PKGBUILD. libao seems happy enough to load any plugin it
finds in its modules directory, whether or not they were built
together (though I didn't test this with the pulse plugin in
particular).

vcut is now built by default (as upstream finally considers it ready
for prime-time), so the explicit "--enable-vcut" can be removed from
vorbis-tools' configure arguments.

I've been using these upgrades since a few months before they were
released, and they are solid.

(Why am I personally so interested in these upgrades? One big feature,
oddly missing from the release announcement, is that ogg123 now
supports ReplayGain, making it a reasonable replacement for a bigger
music player, at least for me. So vorbis-tools is the main driver as
far as I'm concerned.)