[Pkg-mpd-maintainers] MPD 0.23.2

[kaliko]

Hi

26/10/2021, Florian Schlichting wrote:
> We should decide which of the new plugins to enable, or explicitly
> disable them. I used to enable all plugins for which libraries were
> available in Debian, but I have no idea if the less common ones are used
> at all, and it increases mpd's footprint, so I'm not sure if we should
> keep doing that, or e.g. wait for uses to request a certain feature.
> What do you think?

Waiting for users to ask explicitly for a feature is fine IMHO.
I think it's a good idea to try to reduce MPD's footprint.
Actually I've had a look at this some times ago to build a "slim" 
version of MPD for my own use. Here is a summary of what I came up with.

MPD/bullseye currently pulls 190 packages for a total of 383MB (149 
packages for 185MB without recommends). Measurement done on a fresh 
Debian 11 minimal server.

I'm aware of two use cases (and also my personal use cases).

On laptop/desktop (with a graphical environment) and usually enough 
resources I'm glad to have a fully featured MPD.

On the other hand, on embedded device running Debian (such as derivative 
armhf/raspbian or arm64 vanilla Debian) it can be upsetting to have the 
fully featured package on a headless device (I've heard "bloated" on 
IRC…). For instance, IIRC, libav dependency is pulling many part of X, 
font, etc… The sphinx doc is pulling some javascript libraries, even 
though it's only 3 packages for less than 696+304+186 KB, some users are 
surprised to pull some js libs to run MPD…

Then, that being said, I think there's little we can do to address all 
use cases. Here are where I believe we might have room for improvement:

   * disable qobuz (cf. github#1209 [0]).
   * move documentation in it's own package (little gain, 3 pkgs ~1MB + 
600Kb of html to compare to the additional burden on Debian infra)
   * remove some exotic, barely used file formats. How do we define 
exotic then… and as you said, Florian, we have no idea which ones are used.

Regarding the new features in 0.23 branch, mainly snapcast and pipewire:

    * snapcast nearly comes for free (not extra build/run dep)
    * I don't have yet an idea regarding pipewire but I think you're 
right and we should enable it to prepare potential future desktop setup.

Sorry for this long answer, hopefully, it might trigger some inputs from 
other users following the list :)

Cheers
k.

[0] https://github.com/MusicPlayerDaemon/MPD/issues/1209

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