mkvinfo-gui launches text version.

[Adam Buchbinder]

Binary package hint: mkvtoolnix

Install mkvtoolnix. Then install mkvtoolnix-gui. Now, when you run mkvinfo-gui some-file.mkv, the output is in text format, rather than the expected graphical format.

This may be an artifact caused by using the following sequence of events to install the package--that is, two separate calls to aptitude.

$ sudo aptitude install mkvtoolnix
$ sudo aptitude install mkvtoolnix-gui

A simple workaround is to pass the --gui/-g flag, which causes the GUI to pop up.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 8.10
Package: mkvtoolnix-gui 2.0.2-1.1
ProcEnviron:
 SHELL=/bin/bash
 PATH=/home/username/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin/X11:/usr/games
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
SourcePackage: mkvtoolnix
Uname: Linux 2.6.25-custom05 i686

[Julien Lavergne (gilir)]

Thanks for the report.

Confirmed for me.

[Moritz Bunkus (moritz-bunkus)]

Just for information: this is not a bug, it is working as intended. The mkvtoolnix-gui package just provides mmg and a mkvinfo executable that has been compiled with GUI support whereas the mkvtoolnix package comes without dependencies on the wxWidgets libraries.

As for mkvinfo not starting the GUI by default: this is working as intended as well. I (the author) am most likely the person who uses mkvinfo the most, daily, during development, and I don't need the GUI at all. What I need is exactly what it does, console based information about a Matroska file that I can easily grep and look at.

I will not accept patches into the upstream sources that change mkvinfo's behaviour in this regard; you could of course patch the Ubuntu packages accordingly. Just remember to provide an option to not start the GUI, e.g. "--no-gui".

[Julien Lavergne (gilir)]

I think the mkvinfo compiled with gui should start with --gui flag, But it's just a trick to do in the package, upstream should not be concerned about this. There will be always a mkvinfo without the gui support in the mkvtoolnix package.

[Christian Lins (cli)]

The menu entry of mkvinfo should either point to "mkvinfo --gui" or the entry should be removed from the start menu.
The current behaviour (doing nothing visible) is highly confusing for an unexperienced user.

[MestreLion (mestrelion)]

At least in Maverick, I don't have any menu item for mkvinfo, unfortunately.

But I do agree with OP: if there is a binary called "mkvinfo-gui", than it should *always* open the GUI version, regardless of command line arguments. For the text version there is already the binaries "mkvinfo-text" and "mkvinfo" (which is an alternatives system symlink that can point to either of them)

@Moriz (author): currently filenames are *very* misleading. From the user's point of view, there's no reason to have a "binary named *-gui with gui support that defaults to text". If YOU prefer to use text-only, would be much better for everyone if you either use mkvinfo-text directly OR point the mkvinfo symlink to the text version (which is already the default), OR make an alias.

@Ubuntu packagers: I've downloaded Precise's packages and, so far, I've noticed 2 issues regarding this:

1 - /usr/share/applications/mkvinfo.desktop is pointing to "mkvinfo-text -g", which will not work. Should be "mkvinfo-gui -g"

2 - Both GUIs, mkvinfo and mmg are missing their icons (none are installed, altough both are present in upstream tarball)