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

[Ben Taylor]

Thomas Vander Stichele wrote:

>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.
>
I have a good reason. Sun's Gnome-2.0 is kinda broke, and because they 
chose to put
the support code in the /usr file system, the only way I can build is to 
build a tree that
I'm confident in is to remove Sun's Gnome-2.0 and build it from scratch. 
 I spent about
two weeks adding code into the current Garnome tree to build all the 
support code
(png, tiff, expat, etc) that is normally just part of a Linux system.

I hit a wall building Gstreamer, and part of it is because my current 
gcc doesn't
use gas, so I'm in the process of building gcc again to use gas.

>>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.
>
Well, I assume that the configure script will do the right things and 
either error out
if there are hard dependencies on libraries that don't exist, or report 
that optional
libraries aren't available.

The thing I really like about Garnome:  You can tell it what 
dependencies you
need for a specific application like Gstreamer, and it will go out and 
build all that
stuff before building Gstreamer.  On Solaris, Sun decides what is part 
of a distribution,
but like I said before, the current 2.0 stuff was in /usr, which 
prevented me from isolating
their stuff from what I was building. At least in the 2.0-beta3, it was 
in /opt, so I just
need to keep /opt/gnome-2.0/bin out of my path.  

>>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.
>
Agreed.  I've done the home grown gnome thing before and it was a lot of 
work. I don't
think I'd ever do it again without using Garnome.

I realize I'm in a very small minority that I'm on Solaris and compiling 
gnome from
scratch.  However, as long as I can code the dependencies into Garnome, 
I don't
ever have to worry about it again.

Ben