Comment 40 for bug 87299

I am not a programmer, but I don't think you would need more dependencies. Just check if the new interface is available, if yes use it, if not, use the old. This is what the Banshee people did. Did you look at their patch?
Maybe the change is trivial since the keys are basically recognized correctly and everything worked in Gnome 2.16 and earlier?

But these are all guesses since I don't know anything about the program code of amarok.

I think there are a lot Gnome amarok users and it would be too bad if they lost this functionality.
Or would you say that fixing this is the responsibility of distributors?