Everything old is new again
Remember a while back when I said I wasn’t using Fedora anymore? That was a lie. Ubuntu is the only other distro I’ve found to meet my current wants of being desktop-oriented, active and not completely ridiculous, and it and Fedora do about 80% of what I’d like them to do. And since those 80 per-cents don’t completely overlap, I’ve ended up using both. Fun!
Anyway, one of the little bothersome things in Fedora is that the speed of development, uncoupled from a slow-lumbering leviathan like Ubuntu’s Debian, makes some things difficult. It creates a moving-target mess, sometimes ignored out of convenience, for third-party software, and if, for example, your favorite music player shits the bed and changes everything in the latest version, then too bad: the old one’s gone. I’ve been keeping a handful of rpms around that allow some old libraries and packages to be installed in the new environment, and I’ve finally made a yum repository out of them. It has two goals in mind: make it easy to install the Amazon MP3 downloader, and bring back Amarok 1.4.
http://reallylongword.org/longcompat/11/i386/longcompat-release-1-1.fc11.noarch.rpm
There’s also a release package for Rawhide, but it’s just the same thing; either one will work. Installing the repository will make available the dependencies for amazonmp3.rpm, and it includes a package for Amarok as amarok14. You’ll have to hit the yes I’m serious button a few times and input the root password a whole bunch as is usual for these things, but otherwise it’s all signed and everything and should just do its thing.
While putting this together I created a sort of build system, and while it’s sort of sloppy—it calls mock about a billion times for every little thing and I don’t think it uses timestamps quite right—but still, it’s the culmination of several heaping tablespoons of annoying google searches, trial and error and Makefile targets borrowed from previous projects, and I thought it might be helpful to put it all in one place for anyone who might be trying to do something similar. It’s on github at http://github.com/reallylongword/longcompat. Let me know if something goes horribly wrong or if you have any suggestions.