[gst-devel] Re: gst-player and hermes

[Thomas Vander Stichele]

> Dear Christian
> 
> Thanks for your answer.
> 
> This, _fortunately_, is not true in my case since I love to install my system manually from source. So, I am not only bored from installing many packages (which is true but I can cope with that) but I have discussed with myself many times what to install and what not. This is why I awaited gst-player, for an example. I do not have Xine or such on my newly installed system and couldn't listen to my oggs for weeks now. But, I decided to not install something I don't want if something better for my case is possibly coming up soon.

My personal opinion is that we shouldn't try to cater for the 0.01% that 
compiles from source (do you have good reason to do so ?).
Especially now with something like gentoo, I don't see any point at all in 
doing everything by hand.

> People who depend on distros may install whatever their distroa prefer 
> without asking or even thinking about that. I don't think that this is 
> the way to go. We should discuss dependencies over and over. The point is 
> that there are core dependencies and, besides that, there are a lot of 
> optional dependencies. I just care about the core dependencies - as long 
> as the optional dependencies are really optional. You already seem to 
> solve the problem with that core dependency Hermes.

> Hermes is not really 
> a core application on linux systems and thus should not be a core 
> dependency for gst-player.

That's a weird statement to make.  I don't know who decides what are core 
applications on linux, but I'd imagine things like vorbis, avifile, and so 
on not being part of them.

> On the other hand, if you keep optional 
> dependencies really optional, then have as many dependencies you want. I 
> will not care since I will skip these options at installation time.

You can decide for yourself whether or not Hermes is optional.  If you 
don't need video playback, then Hermes isn't needed.  If you want video 
playback, it is needed.

I don't really see the problem.  If you insist on compiling your system by 
hand, of course you're going to end up spending lots of time compiling and 
installing dependencies.  Do I wish this on you ? No.  But that's a 
choice you made for yourself.  The solution is not, as you suggest, to 
take out dependencies.  If that rubs you the wrong way, then maybe 
GStreamer is not what you want.  GStreamer is designed to make use of 
libraries.

Thomas

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