Re: Gstreamer packaging

[Phil Blundell <pb@pbcl.net>]

On Wed, 2011-06-29 at 11:33 +0200, Koen Kooi wrote:
> So the new systems does the following:
> 
> * split out each plugin as gst-plugin-<foo>
> * split out each lib as lib<foo>
> 
> So both plugins and libraries have a stable package name (barring plugin renames, e.g. flvdemux -> flv). Package feeds and upgrades finally work as expected

Agreed, I think this is about the only reasonable thing to do.  The way
that the gstreamer folks bundle up their plugins for distribution, and
particularly the semi-arbitrary split between -base, -good and -bad, is
not especially helpful for consumers of those packages.

In the past I have been strongly tempted to just stick all the plugins
(with the possible exception of -ugly, which might require a bit of
ENTERPRISE_DISTRO care) into a single recipe so that at least you always
know which recipe needs building to get a given plugin.  That would
obviously lead to more build time but I think it is probably a good
tradeoff in this situation.  In an ideal world it would be nice for all
the plugins to be packaged independently a la Xorg, but I have no idea
whether the gstreamer folks would be receptive to that idea.

> OE .dev has a slightly different approach where you manually go
> through deploy and see what got generated by who and plug that into
> PROVIDES. I'm not a big fan of that, but it eliminates those scary
> messages.

I guess that does also work, but I didn't like the patch when it first
went into .dev and I am still not very fond of it.

p.