Muxic Beta 2, XMMS2 0.6 Macport

I finally got around to updating Muxic to the new xmms2-0.6DrMattDestruction API. There were a few changes to the xmms2 clientlib that needed attention.

While I was doing this, I noticed that the xmms2 CF clientlib isn’t just superficially unusable, but will rev up your CPU something awful if the xmms2d drops its connection after registration of the clientlib CF runloop event source. It needs a shutdown function, and that shutdown function needs some connection-specific CF variables from the init function. Hence we can’t use the API in its current state (unless there’s some way to inject mainloop-specific state into the xmmsc_connection_t that I don’t know about).

I’ve reported it and presented a patch as XMMS2 bug #2232, but essentially it means that the libxmmsclient-cf that currently comes with xmms2 is very bugged.

Update: patch accepted into xmms2-devel.git.

Since macports haven’t updated their port of xmms2, here is my xmms2 @0.6DrMattDestruction portfile. I would have liked to support variants, but whenever I add my own –with-optionals or –with-plugins options to waf configure, the build breaks with link errors. This happens even when I copy the exact list that waf configure automagically selects without arguments. I haven’t figured out why this is, and trying to trace the internals of waf is a bitch.

Anyway, presenting Muxic Beta 2, source code available in the Muxic git repository as usual.

C multi-character character constants

long x = '\xde\xad\xbe\xef'; // yes, single quotes

Surprisingly (to me at least), this is valid ISO 9899:1999 C. It compiles without warning under gcc with -Wall, and a “multi-character character constant” warning with -pedantic.

According to the standard (ยง6.4.4.4.10),

The value of an integer character constant containing more than one character (e.g., 'ab'), […] is implementation-defined.

A bit of experimentation shows that gcc stores the leftmost character in the literal as the most-significant byte in the integer. But is this a reliable behavior in other common compilers? It’s a cool little piece of esoteric C syntax, but I’m guessing nobody interested in portable code should be using it when an integer constant works just as well.

Muxic beta 1

I have Muxic, my music player for Mac OS X, working to the point that it’s suitable for public consumption. There are still features to be added, but the basic previous/play/pause/stop/next stuff is working.

Caveats: it’s built against the macports xmms2 0.5 DrLecter, installed with the default prefix “/opt/local”, against the Mac OS X 10.5 SDK. Download and try the Muxic 1.0 Beta 1 binary, or check out the Muxic source with git:

git clone https://scarff.id.au/git/muxic.git