[Kdenlive-devel] Kdenlive packaging policies

[Alberto Villa]

On Monday 15 December 2008 10:00:12 Jean-Michel Pouré wrote:
> I don't see many distributions providing efforts to package Kdenlive
> cleanly, with all latest MLT and ffmpeg codecs, appart for Marillat
> Debian-multimedia and Gentoo exceptions.

i just want to say that freebsd is getting kdenlive in the near future, i'm 
just waiting for the ffmpeg port to be patched to submit the mlt's and 
kdenlive

> Of course I did not test all packages, so I might be wrong. Maybe some
> packagers do not simply have the skills to compile Kdenlive cleanly. And
> we cannot expect end-users to be able to compile ffmpeg, MLT and
> Kdenlive with full options turned-on.

reading italian feeds, it doesn't seem a problem of skills, actually it's easy 
to compile kdenlive and it's dependencies... the problem is it is LONG, and 
people is scared of starting the process. but when they start, they easily 
(but after some time) get to the end (i've started seeing duplicated ubuntu 
packages on the net...)

> @dan: do you think it would be possible to build static version of MLT,
> including all ffmpeg stuff staticly.

i think the biggest problem is ffmpeg: no official releases. i'm not 
experienced with linux packages, but freebsd checks if a program is actually 
installed (it's libs, it's files), not its port, so if i, let's say, compile 
ffmpeg on my own, and then install mlt and kdenlive from the ports, 
dependencies are respected. now, ffmpeg can be easily compiled (and i know of 
lots of people already doing this): is it possible to create packages which 
checks for its libs, and not for its package (it's a rude hack, i know, but 
ffmpeg packaging is prehistoric...)?
-- 
Alberto Villa <villa.alberto at gmail.com>