I noticed a potentially serious problems with MusicBrainz support in
Debian. MusicBrainz provides two interfaces: the old RDF interface
and a new one based on XML. According to their wiki, RDF support will
go away in the near future:

http://musicbrainz.org/doc/Web_Service
http://blog.musicbrainz.org/?p=392

However, from what I can tell, most things in Debian use the old
MusicBrainz library which only does RDF.

We have two MusicBrainz libraries in Debian:

Package: libmusicbrainz3
Binary: libmusicbrainz3-6, libmusicbrainz3-dev

Package: libmusicbrainz-2.1
Binary: libmusicbrainz4-dev, libmusicbrainz4c2a, python-musicbrainz

(not sure why the soname of 2.1 is higher of that of version 3)

Version 2.1 provides the old RDF interface which will go away.
Version 3 uses the new XML interface. These libraries have different
APIs.

Now as far as I can tell, most things in Debian link against
libmusicbrainz4c2a, i.e. the old library. It seems we need a
migration to version 3.0 (which may involve updates to the code of
programs since the APIs are different).

I don't know much about MusicBrainz but from what I found it's likely
that MusicBrainz support will break during the lifetime of squeeze
unless we plan a migration now. Any volunteers?

--
Martin Michlmayr
http://www.cyrius.com/


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