Bangin' on a Rok Amarok, KDE, and all that good stuff

Say goodbye to history

And by that, I mean say goodbye to an historical (read: old) bug.

I'd heard these whispers recently about "whenever I add or remove an album from the collection and do an incremental update, my collection gets messed up." Okay -- we've heard these whispers for a long time, but there were so many other things that had to be fixed first that it wasn't clear whether this was a symptom of a different problem or a problem of its own...and it could always be fixed with a full rescan.

However, with the collection being much more solid these days and with this being the only super-visible bug left that I knew of, I decided to tackle this. It turns out that, once the rest of the collection was behaving, this wasn't that hard to find...it just took a lot of debug tracing, because it wasn't obvious. Since the cause was the wrong field being used in a DB query to remove some tracks during an incremental scan, with anything other than a very tiny test collection it could quickly start to make no logical sense what was happening.

The reason I say the bug is historical is that the code causing it has been there since May 2008. While admitting that provides some fodder for naysayers and haters to harp on Amarok for such visible and longstanding bugs, I prefer to take the other approach: it means that all the various issues users have found since the total rewrite that was 2.0 *are* being found and *are* being solved. Some of them just take some time; it's a *lot* of code. But the proof is in the 2.2 ChangeLog.

I managed to sneak in the fix a day before 2.2 was tagged, so when Amarok 2.2 comes out scanning (both full and incremental) should be really quite solid. In fact, since this has been fixed in git, I've yet to hear of any more problems, just lots of happy users. It's just another way that the (very close!) 2.2 is going to *rock*.