Re: Packages of icecast 2.4-beta?

Hi Thomas,

> Do you have the infrastructure to stay current and rebuild e.g. on
> dependency changes?

Yes, we use pbuilder-dist for this. We are providing backports of
related packages including liquidsoap, silan (a new silence detector
application), and libopus0, as well as Airtime itself.

> Actually I now wonder if using OBS could make this task easier. We could
> have a community team and OBS should be able to produce packages for
> most main stream distros and rebuild them automagically.
> build.opensuse.org - they cover at least: opensuse, suse, debian,
> ubuntu, fedora, centos/rhel and mandriva.

Following their search tool I only found SuSE packages:

http://software.opensuse.org/package/icecast

but if they are willing to help, it's all good.

>> We provide apt.sourcefabric.org which is not a PPA as such, it's a
>> regular apt repo.
> 
> Sure, I guess people would be happy to see that and as long as there are
> no major patches to them we'll be happy to support those builds in the
> community.

I agree it wouldn't be helpful to patch with unofficial changes during a
beta cycle. We usually only patch for production users between official
releases, but in consultation with the upstream developers (for example,
we have done this for liquidsoap).

>> Is a beta2 on the horizon? Or are there fixes since beta1 we should
>> include as patches?

> Yeah, I should have rolled one a while ago, there are some issues that
> are creeping out and more testing and eyes on those would actually be
> welcome!

Great, we will give it a try :-)

>> Would it be generally useful to the Icecast community to have a 2.4 test
>> server available? Or do people generally have spare machines to use for
>> this?
> 
> That might actually be quite valuable for interested people to get a
> feeling without having to set up too many things at once, so I very much
> welcome the effort.

OK, I have suggested this to the Airtime team.

> Icecast should out of the box provide the configurability to avoid
> making this a free-for-all abuse box

Debian has tightened up the source/relay/admin passwords now. You get
prompted for the passwords you would like to set at install time, via
debconf, in the latest version.

> e.g. time limit for listeners,
> maybe also source timeout and max number of listeners.

We currently set listener limits for our managed hosting, so that
shouldn't be a problem.

> I may be able to provide one too in the near future. We just received a
> donation of nice machines from Intel at Xiph and they will be installed
> hopefully soon.

Airtime supports up to three independent output streams so it's actually
very easy for users to set up an alternative test stream. I'm sure the
Airtime community would provide some authentic test material if we asked
them to.

Cheers!

Daniel