[kde-solaris] KDE4 External Dependencies

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Friday 25 May 2007, Stefan Teleman wrote:
> On Friday 25 May 2007 19:39, Karol Szwed wrote:
> > I would be really careful on using too many shared dependencies,
> > esp. those used by JDS or those without binary compatibility
> > guarantees from Sun.
> >
> > I presume we want our packages to last through any dependency
> > changes in newer gnome releases, i.e. Solaris will be changing from
> > gnome 2.06 to 2.18 which will introduce version conflicts etc., and
> > the patching frequency of some of these dependent libraries are
> > questionable.
>
> I agree with this. Currently, on S10U2, glib-2.0 and gtk-2.0 are from
> December 2004 and January 2005. This means that the libraries
> themselves are from about 6 months earlier, meaning around June 2004.
> I don't really know exactly which version they are, but they seem
> pretty old to me. I don't even know if a current version of GStreamer
> would work with these libraries.

that's the point of Phonon having backends; it shields us from BC issues in 
underlying frameworks by limiting the impact to one hard point, the Phonon 
backend for that media layer. so if there are BC issues with gstreamer (gtk+, 
gnome, etc are not particularly relevant; nor are gstreamer's encapsulated 
deps) then the plugin needs to be updated. that's about it.

> My second concern is about the Fluendo plugins for GStreamer. From
> what i know, they have not released the same plugins for Solaris as
> they have for Linux. At least i don't see any Solaris GStreamer
> plugins downloads at all at:
>
> https://shop.fluendo.com/product_info.php?products_id=42&osCsid=c5uohm7iuv1
>m6d6mgv7tohisq6
>
> and i have no idea about their Solaris plans.

we're not talking about a plugin for gstreamer. it's a plugin (backend) for 
Phonon that uses gstreamer. the dependencies for it are: Phonon and 
gstreamer.

that's why i asked what GNOME uses on Solaris. the answer was gstreamer, so i 
assume it is in good working order on Solaris. if that is considered the good 
solution by Sun, then either Sun is making a big mistake in doing so or we 
should think about using that same framework for KDE/Solaris out of respect 
for those who set up gstreamer and have to support both KDE and GNOME (or 
switch between them). this doesn't mean people can't use the other Phonon 
backends, it's more a question of defaults.

how well does gstreamer work on Solaris?

> > Perhaps I am taking too much of a commercial view on this but if
> > done properly, I cannot see why the same set of KDE packages cannot
> > work on Solaris 10 Update 0 through to Update 4 (7/07) and Nevada
> > irrespective of any changes to JDS and its dependent libraries. I
> > assume this is what our users also want.
>
> We would also be creating a transitive dependency: JDS/Glib2/Gtk2 ->
> GStreamer -> Fluendo. We are probably not going to have any influence
> at all on Fluendo.

woah; on solaris gstreamer depends on GNOME? that's ... interesting. as for 
influence on Fluendo, why do you think they are paying for the authoring of a 
Phonon gstreamer plugin? KDE/Solaris may not have a huge amount of pull, but 
KDE has a decent amount indeed.

> > It may be wishful thinking on my part and would create more work
> > for us in the short term (more deps we would need to package), but
> > with the aim of reducing work in the longer term. Doing this would
> > also allow users to uninstall JDS if they so wish.
>
> I also believe that keeping our releases self-contained and with as
> few external dependencies as possible makes our lives easier in the
> long run, although this creates more work for us. But i think a
> phonon-xine or a phonon-nmm is more manageable than multiple
> dependencies on Glib2/Gtk2, GStreamer and Fluendo.

if there are groups that support both GNOME and KDE systems, then having a 
common media layer is a big plus. i'm not sure there are any gtk2 deps in 
gstreamer?

anyways, you folks do know more about the situation on Solaris than i do. we 
also probably want to, at some point, look at providing backends for Solid 
that work with whatever is on Solaris (or is HAL/DBUS working well on solaris 
now?)

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

Full time KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com)
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