vlc/vlc-nox distinction

[Reinhard Tartler]

On Mon, Aug 18, 2014 at 8:13 PM, Sebastian Ramacher
<sramacher at debian.org> wrote:
> (Dropping J-B from CC. I think this is purely Debian related now.)
>
> On 2014-08-18 22:37:42, Sebastian Ramacher wrote:
>> On 2014-08-17 23:22:02, Jean-Baptiste Kempf wrote:
>> > On 16 Aug, Reinhard Tartler wrote :
>> > > I believe that upstream doesn't care that much about this, because
>> >
>> > I remember the idea.
>> >
>> > Basically, the idea was to split so that servers using VLC to do
>> > streaming wouldn't need libX11 and all the rest.
>> >
>> > > otherwise I'd expect the Makefiles to be a bit more helpful with
>> > > determining this. J-B, I'd like you to confirm if I'm right here.
>> >
>> > This idea indeed failed, because libavcodec, one of the main codec
>> > library, can depend on vdpau/vaapi, and both of those acceleration
>> > libraries thought it was cool to use libX11...
>> > Therefore, a vlc-noX wouldn't have avcodec plugin...
>> >
>> > Some other distributions split the VLC free-stack (Xiph formats)
>> > from the rest, for patent reasons.
>> >
>> > For 3rd party programs using libvlc, an idea was to do a vlc-plugins
>> > splitted from vlc, so that they don't get libQt in.
>> > So, something like:
>> >  - libvlccore
>> >  - libvlc
>> >  - vlc-core-plugins
>> >  - vlc
>>
>> I'll see if I can come up with something here and prototype a possible
>> split. As soon as I've got something, I'll post a link to a branch.
>
> I've pushed a work-in-progress feature/vlc-plugins branch [1]. vlc-nox
> has been left alive. Looking at the popcon data there seems to be
> interest in the package (vlc: 51349 installs vs. vlc-nox: 53687
> installs).

The problem I initially experienced was how to come up with commits
such as http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/pkg-multimedia/vlc.git/commit/?h=feature/vlc-plugins&id=3909306d196dff05726cf3c800fa62bf2f8e7ad8
without spending hours trying to figure out what renames, additions
and removals of vlc plugins happend upstream. I started with a hit and
miss, but after 5 recompilations of VLC *sic* I got tired of failing
builds at package assembly time and started to grep and diff
buildlogs. I am therefore wondering if that effort is really worth the
trouble. I seems that you think it is. OK. Maybe I can come up with
scripts to grep  the build logs to streamline this process.

> I've done the following instead:
>
>  - Improved the check if plugins in vlc-nox link against libX11 or
>    libxcb.

http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/pkg-multimedia/vlc.git/commit/?h=feature/vlc-plugins&id=318ef48b70b3cb2d2f85755766418eb97f7bf5a8

Awesome, that makes very much sense to me!

>  - Moved the RDP plugin to vlc as it is linked to libX11 via
>    libfreerdp1.

Yes.

>  - Killed vlc-plugin-pulse and moved the PulseAudio plugins to vlc.
>    Xfce, KDE and Gnome all pull in libpulse0 anyway, so I think there is
>    no need for the split.

I don't have a strong opinion on this. I feel that users might
complain, but we can surely wait for those bug reports to happen (if
they happen)

>  - Added vlc-plugin-samba package and moved the Samba plugin there. I
>    think it makes much more sense to split this from vlc-nox (~50 MiB of
>    extra dependencies) and it's been requested.

Yikes! - That makes very much sense to me.

> The vlc-plugin-samba and vlc-plugin-pulse changes can be reverted of
> course if they are to controversial. The other changes should make it
> possible to handle the plugin split a bit better for the time being. I
> think it's better to revisit this after the jessie release and get vlc
> ready for the libav transition for now.
>
> Let me know what you think.

Awesome work, thank you very much!

The only piece that I'm missing is what Fabian mentioned: A more
declarative way to describe what plugin goes to vlc-nox and what to
vlc. See above.

Given that vlc is currently in NEW anyway, I guess uploading to
unstable as 2.2.0~pre2-2 would hurt.

Best,
Reinhard


-- 
regards,
    Reinhard