[PlanetCCRMA] Planet CCRMA lands on the Fedora Core 1 universe

[Fernando Pablo Lopez-Lezcano]

No, I have not been sleeping all this time... so, for those that like to
live on the bleeding edge (hi Ryan! :-) here comes...

A first release (codenamed "release 1", ahem, I have to come up with
really cute names and matching stories for future releases :-) of the
Planet CCRMA audio applications package collection is ready for download
and install. This initial release includes most of the audio
applications of previous releases (for RedHat 7.3/8.0/9), but none of
the video related packages. Those will be added in the near future. 

For even more details please visit the online Changelog, here's a short
summary of what's available:

* The Planet Core packages:

The Planet CCRMA kernel (2.4.22-9.23rc3.ll.rhfc1.ccrma) is now based on
2.4.23-rc3, released a few days ago (I've been tracking the latest
releases closely) plus the usual low latency goodies. 

The Fedora Core kernel (2.4.22-1.2115.nptl.caps.rhfc1.ccrma) has, as
usual, the capabilities patch added. 

ALSA is based on a CVS snapshot of 0.9.8 (dated 2003/11/06) that
includes the new ALSA 1.0.0pre API (see the Changelog for what you have
to do to rebuild ALSA applications that do not take that into account). 

All these components have not seen a lot of testing but seem to behave
well. An upgrade to 2.4.23 final will follow (probably) very soon - rc4
was released today but I said, well, enough is enough :-) 

* The Planet CCRMA audio packages:

Wherever possible before rebuilding I have updated to the latest
available version of the package (not everything is up to the latest, I
had to stop somewhere!). These packages have new versions:

qjackctl, muse, cmucl, clisp, cm-clm-cmn, ecasound, rezound, speex,
libmad, id3lib, fltk, fftw (now build for multiple architectures),
wxGTK, fox, raptor, liblrdf, apt, ladcca. 

A couple of packages have been added as well: id3libtag, fftw3 (built
for multiple architectures). 

Some stuff is missing: the pd world (I really want to update to 0.37
soon), some mp3 related goodies (you have ogg, right?). 

And I think that's all for now. 
So, as I usually say:
Enjoy!!
-- Fernando

PS1: the newer versions of packages and kernels will slowly percolate to
the older RedHat releases. 

PS2: some surprises along the way:

There were a few bumps that delayed things (in addition to trying to
update to a newer kernel and alsa, perhaps not a brilliant idea).
Prelinking is one of them. It's a new feature in Fedora Core 1 that
helps in making applications that link to lots of shared libraries start
faster. The prelink information is stored in a new chunk in the elf
executable for each program. So imagine what happens when you try to use
jackstart (which was happy the previous day) and it tells you that the
checksum of jackd is wrong. And you know you changed nothing. And rpm -V
insists in telling you the executable has not changed. And yet you can
_see_ that it is bigger! But the date has not changed! Surprise! :-)

Another was the inclusion of exec-shield in the Fedora Core kernel. It
protects (I think) against some types of overflow attacks but it also
prevents some applications that do weird things with the stack from
running. Clisp is one of them. After trying to convince it to compile in
such a way that exec-shield is automatically disabled for it, I finally
gave up and used a simple hack (start the app with "setarch i386 clisp")
and it works (but I also had to use cvs clisp, the latest official
release did not like Fedora). 

Another one (apparently common lisp is tough) was cmucl. I found it
impossible to find a binary that would start in Fedora Core, I would
guess due to small incompatibilities in glibc and the loader. And you
cannot rebuild cmucl without a running cmucl. Ouch. I found a really
hacky way to get it to run and then tried unsuccessfully to build a new
cmucl from the running one. Apparently it is not at all easy so I
eventually gave up (another day gone). The hack is a hack but it seems
to work for now. Hopefully we'll have a better cmucl at some point.