[Abcde-users] Running abcde on recent Mac OS X versions

[Gabriel Rosenkoetter]

On 22 Aug, 2016, at 12:49EDT, Steve McIntyre <steve at einval.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 19, 2016 at 12:30:18PM -0400, Gabriel Rosenkoetter wrote:
>> 2. It seems like the WebService::MusicBrainz Perl module that
>> abcde-musicbrainz-tool depends upon has been kind of abandoned for
...
>> started on this?
> Hmmmm. I'm the person who wrote abcde-musicbrainz-tool initially, and
> I'm still using it regularly. I've not really been paying too much
> attention to the support status of the underlying module, though. It's
> plausible to rewrite the code there quite easily if needed. Patches
> definitely welcome if you're interested!

Not needed! Bob Faist responded to my email and updated both his git repo and CPAN to WS::MB 0.94, under which those tests that were failing reliably now succeed.

(I didn’t dig too deeply into the diffs, but it looks like the tests were failing because the MB data for the specific “Releases” he was checking against had been altered some time in the past 6 years. I guess maybe if I were MB, I’d have some immutable records in my DB that were intended to be used for people to validate their applications’ functionality against the MB API but, hey, whatever.)

> Ah, cool. What I'd like to do is include a (some?) good exmaple
> abcde.conf examples directly in the package, and I have a Debian bug
> open for exactly that. If we can do similarly useful stuff for OS X
> too, then great!

Sure!

It may make sense for us to collaborate off the list for that, but here’s the short version of things I have pinned in abcde.conf that are Mac OS X-related, rather than personal preference (I think I see the right places make these things the OS-dependent defaults, and I’ll send you patches through the normal channels):

# default abcde curl opts leave out -L, but without it curl doesn’t
# follow redirects, and like 90% of coverartarchive.org is redirects,
# because edge routing
HTTPGET=curl
#HTTPGETOPTS="-f -s -L"
HTTPGETOPTS="-f -L"

# abcde won't try to use $DISPLAYCMD without $DISPLAY being set to
# *something*, because X11, but we can do native GUI without paying
# any attention to that environment variable
DISPLAY=fakeit
# for checking album art in Preview.app
DISPLAYCMD=open
DISPLAYCMDOPTS=""
# to just "reveal" in the Finder rather than open in Preview
#DISPLAYCMDOPTS=-R

I played around with triggering Mac OS X’s “Quick Look” from the command line (what you get on a Mac if you tap “space” on, say, an image file) and you *can* do that, through `qlmanage -p`, but that wasn’t ever really intended as an end-user tool, it spits a bunch of garbage to STDERR, and if you do something horrible like feed it a 0-byte file it’ll crash out silently and hang around in the background indefinitely. So… maybe don’t do that. The one up side is that you can just hit “escape” and close the pop-up, without leaving another GUI app running, and without having to context-switch back to the terminal where you’re running abcde but… eh. Doesn’t really seem worth it to me, especially not as a default.

>> These days, all the computers that exist physically in my home run
[blah blah blah]
>> website, which may be more practical).
> 
> Please feel free to post this kind of stuff in the wiki:
> 
>  https://abcde.einval.com/wiki/
> 
> We've not got much content there yet, so help is great!

Sure, will do. I’m going to maybe go through the motions of making at least the MacPorts version of abcde happier by default before writing a bunch of stuff up, since I’d just go change it afterwards. I could certainly toss those couple of abcde.conf items there, though.

Unless I’m totally ignorant of how MoinMoin works, I think you’ve just got the front page there right now. Do you have any theoretical organization structure in mind for OS-specific tips?

>> [updating MacPorts package from 2.7 to 2.7.2 to reflect the bug fix explicitly for Mac OS X]
> *grin*

I’m going to take a look at that this afternoon. I *think* it’s totally trivial, but I haven’t actually tried yet, so...

--
Gabriel Rosenkoetter
gr at eclipsed.net

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