Packaging: Bad dependencies in GMP

[Shane Fagan]

GMP shouldnt depend on vlc, xine and gstreamer. Because for Ubuntu at least the user will have gstreamer installed anyway and might not need xine or vlc for the backend. It should just work with whats installed and suggest all them.

[Michael Lamothe (lamothe-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount)]

Valid, but I have no idea how to do this.

[Shane Fagan (shanepatrickfagan)]

Well after playing about with the program a little I noticed that the engine menu option shouldnt really be there. The user shouldnt really have a choice. It should try them one at a time till it works. For the packaging thing you change the debian control file. http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-relationships.html

[Michael Lamothe (lamothe-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount)]

Then it won't build. I thought that you were originally asking for a dynamically built engine list (that bit I don't know how to do). This is a just packaging issue, right? If so, you've raised this in the wrong spot and it will FTBFS if this is done. You want "GNOME Media Player (Ubuntu)", correct?

[Michael Lamothe (lamothe-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount)]

"user shouldnt really have a choice" ... I think that you're missing the point. The whole thing is about giving the user choice. Maybe this is not your thing, but it's not a bug.

[Shane Fagan (shanepatrickfagan)]

Im using the package from the ppa.
Hmmm so what does the package need to build? Thats what should be a dependency and all the rest should be should be suggests or recommends. What im asking for.

[Shane Fagan (shanepatrickfagan)]

"I mean thats what im asking for" instead of "what im asking for"

[Michael Lamothe (lamothe-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount)]

:)

The application is linked to libvlc, libgstreamer and libxine (xine-lib). There's currently no option to conditionally compile any of those engines out. So, it needs all of them.

Just a little background for you, the GStreamer version in Lucid cannot deinterlace, VLC can't use mouse scroll seeking under GNOME and xine-lib can't play some file types. All these things are being addressed (in some way) by their upstream projects but for Lucid there was no single application that suited my needs, so I wrote my own. I hope when Maverick comes around this application will become obsolete, but I won't hold my breath. Until then I don't have an existing media player that ticks all the boxes.