gstreamer0.8-swfdec creates a circular build-dependency

[LaMont Jones]

gstreamer0.8-swfdec should probably be broken out into it's own source package,
or something, in order to eliminate the circular build-dependency that currently
exists. There really shouldn't be a need to bootstrap these packages.

libs/gst-plugins0.8_0.8.11-0ubuntu4 Dependencies: libswfdec0.3-dev
libs/swfdec0.3_0.3.4-3ubuntu1 Dependencies: libgstreamer-gconf0.8-dev

thanks

[Loïc Minier (lool)]

Hi,

(I'm a Debian maintainer for gst-plugins0.8.)

I've looked at the issue shortly, and it seems this is what happens:
- swfdec0.3 builds a library, a dev package, and a mozilla plugin
- the mozilla plugins uses gstreamer gconf bindings (libgstreamer-gconf and
libgstreamer-gconf-dev) to query the gstreamer audio configuration from gconf
and use it
- gst-plugins0.8 builds the libgstreamer-gconf packages, and a
gstreamer0.8-swfdec package which uses the libswf packages

Given this, I think the options are:
a/ split swfdec in two, one source package for the lib, one source package for
the mozilla plugin
b/ split gst-plugins0.8 in two, one source package for gstreamer-swfdec alone,
one source package for the rest
c/ split gst-plugins0.8 in two, one source package for libgstreamer-gconf and
plugins, one source package for the rest
d/ merge the gstreamer-swfdec source into the swfdec source (or swfdec in
gst-plugins muahaha :)
e/ drop gstreamer-swdec

This bootstrapping problem also concerns building of RPM packages for other
distributions, not only adding arches to Debian and Ubuntu, or rebuilding the
archive.

My position on this for Debian is that splits cost time and tend to diverge much
from upstream.
gst-plugins is complicated enough that I don't want to implement c/.
that leaves c/ and e/, which I'm not fond of doing.

So, I pinged the swfdec maintainer, which is also upstream for gstreamer, and he
said he doesn't care about these circular build-deps because they will disappear
with gstreamer0.9/0.10.

Hence, I'm not particulary encouraged to resolve the issue either; FYI, the last
release date I heard for gstreamer0.9/0.10 was in november.

Let me know if it's ok for you to continue the manual bootstrapping as it is
done right now until gstreamer 0.10 is released, or if you prefer working on a
patch against gst-plugins0.8 implementing one of c/ or e/.

I can also easily remove gstreamer-swfdec if you have any data showing it's not
that useful.

Bye,
a/ and d/ would be up to the swfdec maintainer.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

thanks Loïc for the detailled comment on that and the solutions, waiting for
0.9/0.10 is fine imho

[William Grant (wgrant)]

Sebastien, has this been resolved yet? It has been 1.5 years since the last response.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

No, gstreamer0.8 is deprecated and will likely be dropped though

[Stéphane Loeuillet (leroutier)]

This bug would never be fixed.
gst 0.8 has been deprecated for more than 1 year

newer swfdec (0.4 branch) is divided in swfdec (core lib) and mozilla-plugin (2 source tarballs)