As in the title: KAudioCreator in its default configuration expects oggenc, flac, and lame on the system, so the corresponding packages (media-sound/vorbis-tools, media-libs/flac, media-sound/lame respectively) should be listed in RDEPEND. This was reported and fixed in the KDE 3.2 version as https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=62605 and https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=79515, but it's been over 10 years and the fix has apparently disappeared from the ebuild. Since those bugs are so old I thought it better to file a new report, but if I goofed, this should probably be marked as a duplicate of 79515 (and that bug reopened, I hope).
What happens when these dependencies are not around? If these are just optional runtime dependencies, as the bugs do indicate, I would go for pkg_postinst messages instead.
(In reply to Andreas Sturmlechner from comment #1) > What happens when these dependencies are not around? If these are just > optional runtime dependencies, as the bugs do indicate, I would go for > pkg_postinst messages instead. The way it's configured out-of-the-box, there are four encoders to choose from: WAV, Ogg, FLAC, and Lame. The WAV encoder (actually transcoder) is effectively built-in, but the others require their respective external dependencies to work. If a user selects an encoder that isn't installed, the program will rip the CD to WAV files in a temporary directory but won't be able to convert those WAV files to the Ogg/FLAC/MP3 files the user wants. (I thought it should give an error message if you pick an encoder that isn't available, but for me it's just sitting there waiting... the specific response is a matter for upstream but the point is it doesn't complete its task.) If a user just clicks the "Rip" button to make the program go, it tries to use the Ogg encoder by default. So the default behavior, in its current status, leads to the program being unable to complete its task. Using pkg_postinst messages would be a reasonable fix but it should be worded in a way that shows most users are definitely going to want one or more of these things installed, and it's not just an "if you feel like it"-optional dependency. If that makes sense.
That's not what I'd call handling optional runtime deps gracefully. Perhaps they should be added unconditionally, people probably won't expect otherwise with such a package.
Perhaps so. But then again, people who only ever create, say, Ogg files don't need Lame on their system. For those people KAudioCreator is 100% fully functional without Lame. It seems consistent with Gentoo philosophy, as I understand it, to offer them the choice. Personally, I'd rather have unconditional dependencies than no dependencies, but I could see how another person might object to that. I think it would be ideal if the dependencies could be enabled/selected by default but could be disabled by the user. USE flags almost do this except that they can't be enabled by default in the ebuild itself, as far as I know.
Thanks, I've added a pkg_postinst message in git commit 02f9caab082f41d7502d5a20ebbac08dbe563356 so that users are informed about all the optional runtime deps, but also warned if none of them are currently installed.
A KF5-based snapshot is now in tree. As a user of kaudiocreator, you may want to give it some testing. ;)
