the right home for Phonon

[Marc Espie]

On Sat, May 17, 2008 at 09:09:05AM +0200, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> Marc Espie wrote:
> >When you configure Qt with phonon, then you end up with a qtconfig that
> >links with gstreamer to provide the phonon-tab, which is a packager
> >nightmare, since you end up with your main qt package requiring lots of
> >shit, instead of having stuff nicely segregated in plugins, like happens
> >with the database stuff.
> 
> Well, qtconfig still links to Qt3Support, thereby defeating any package 
> splitting you may want to have.

I'm afraid you don't get the point. I'm not talking about Qt proper, I'm
talking about Qt parts that pull in lots of extra software.

This is a packaging issue, not a linking issue.  I don't really care
that qtconfig pulls in lots of qt libraries, since it's not running
for a long time.

Concretely, I have a main qt package, that depends (more or less) on
glib2, iconv, intl, png, dbus, ssl, X11.

Then I have a mysql package, that depends on mysqlclient.
And similarly, the postgresql package, that depends on postgresql-client.
likewise for sqlite, and sqlite2.

The point being, people installing qt4 don't necessarily want to install
mysql and postgresql as well.

With qt4.4, suddenly, I get the whole set of gstreamer dependencies added
to that, that is: gstreamer itself, libxml2, and more glib2 libraries.

I could split qtconfig with the gstreamer stuff, but that means decreasing
functionality for qt itself.

So, concretely, I can either tell my users to install even MORE stuff if
they want qt4, or I have to provide two distinct flavors of qt4, one built
with gstreamer, and another without gstreamer.