[kde-solaris] KDE4 External Dependencies

[Stefan Teleman]

On 5/26/07, Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org> wrote:
>
> 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?

I have not seen it working. Also, i have never seen the Totem media
player in JDS work on Solaris, with the GStreamer backend. Solaris
users who want to be able to play music use either Xmms, MPlayer or
Xine, either downloaded from Blastwave, or home built.

> > 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.

I don't think Sun is paying for a Phonon GStreamer plugin. I suspect
Sun is paying Fluendo for Solaris GStreamer plugins (i have no direct
knowledge). But, right now i do not see any GStreamer plugins for
Solaris downloadable from Fluendo's site. I only see Linux GStreamer
plugins.

> 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?

I agree there would be big pluses in having a common media layer with
JDS. But right now i don't see where the common layer is.

> 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?)

There is an older version of D-Bus (0.6.x) in S10U2 (and probably in
U3 as well), it may have been upgraded to a newer version in Nevada.

The only information i can find about Solaris HAL is here:

http://opensolaris.org/os/project/tamarack/

"HAL Device Manager is a Python GNOME application that shows a tree of
HAL devices and their properties. Basically a GUI version of
lshal(1M). This is a development tool, not an end-user application."

I briefly looked inside the downloadable HAL package and i do not see
binaries for hald, or libhal. I would be happy to be proven wrong,
because it appears that HAL is still in need of a Solaris port.

--Stefan

-- 
Stefan Teleman
KDE e.V.
stefan.teleman at gmail.com