Re: [jokosher-devel] Autopackage of Jokosher

["Taj Morton" <tajmorton gmail com>]

On 1/4/07, Stuart Langridge <sil kryogenix org> wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-01-03 at 22:03 -0800, Taj Morton wrote:
> >  I'm planing on creating a
> > separate Autopackage of GStreamer (and its plugins). These packages
> > will only be installed if the system doesn't have the correct version
> > installed.
>
> Cool. Question: if the system doesn't have the correct version installed
> but *could* have it installed -- say, for instance, some GStreamer
> plugins, which can be installed in Ubuntu but aren't necessarily by
> default -- will it be able to install the distribution's version? My
> worry here is that it won't, which means that later on if they *do*
> decide to install the distro's version they'll have collisions...
Ugg. No, Autopackage can't install packages using the distros
depsolver. This is for a few reasons, namely:
a) it's hard
b) all distros do it differently
c) there's really no reliable way to know what the distro calls the
package that we call "@gstreamer.org/plugins-good" (autopackage
rootname). Some distros like to split packages up into a lot of
smaller packages (Mandriva, for example, has amarok, amarok-xmms,
amarok-xine, etc), which adds to our difficulties.

This means that some distro(s) might break gstreamer up even finer
than the different types of plugins (e.g., into
gstreamer-plugins-base-codecs [vorbis, theora, video4linux],
gstreamer-plugins-base-soundsystem [alsa, oss, etc], etc).

Basically, it's really hard to install the distros packages when we
don't know what they're called, and we can't really find out. (We
can't query apt to figure out what package provides the file called
libgsttypefindfunctions.so).

</distro-package-manager-integration-rant>

Back on track: Do Ubuntu's gstreamer packages miss some critical
plugins for Jokosher? If so, I'm not really sure what to do. I don't
like the idea of replacing something like gstreamer with an
Autopackage, because I consider gstreamer part of the "core OS/Desktop
Platform"--something that shouldn't be changed by 3rd parties. If
Ubuntu (or another distro) has this problem where they ship GStreamer,
but miss an important plugin, the best solution is probably to ship
the entirety of GStreamer, which I'd really like to avoid.

Really the whole GStreamer plugin thing is questionable in my mind,
but that's off topic and not for the jokosher mailing list. (I'd
prefer "GStreamer" to be a single well-defined thing which apps could
depend on and expect certain things to be present)

> I'd love to see an autopackage.  It'd make our download page a lot
> simpler. I'll also build a bit of JavaScript to show appropriate
> packages for distros if we have them and the autopackage if not, which
> I'll then bung upstream to you guys (since I remember you were looking
> for it a while back, unless that's changed).
Great!

Cheers,
--
Taj
http://www.wildgardenseed.com/Taj/blog

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