[Nepomuk] Nepomuk - Moving away from Strigi

[Eric Hameleers]

On Mon, 8 Oct 2012, Aleix Pol wrote:

> Date: Mon, 8 Oct 2012 15:59:12 +0200
> From: Aleix Pol <aleixpol at kde.org>
> To: Vishesh Handa <me at vhanda.in>
> Cc: kde-devel at kde.org, Nepomuk mailing list <nepomuk at kde.org>,
>     kde-packagers at kde.org
> Subject: Re: [Nepomuk] Nepomuk - Moving away from Strigi
> 
> On Mon, Oct 8, 2012 at 3:51 PM, Vishesh Handa <me at vhanda.in> wrote:
>> Hey everyone
>>
>> For 4.10, Nepomuk will no longer depend on Strigi for file indexing. We have
>> written our own file indexer which are based on popular libraries such as
>> taglib, exiv, ffmpeg, etc. This allows us to better control the indexing
>> process. If you would like to know more reasons as to why the change was
>> done, please read [1].
>>
>> I will be merging this new file indexing code into master by the end of the
>> week.
>>
>> @ Packagers:
>>
>> I talked with Will Stephenson (OpenSuse) a couple of weeks back, and he
>> informed me that it might be problematic for distributions to ship
>> nepomuk-core if it depends on ffmpeg, taglib, and other packages which are
>> slightly controversial. Is this going to be a problem? He suggested that the
>> file indexing plugins be present in a separate repository. It doesn't affect
>> us much, so I would like to know your opinion? Do you want it to be in a
>> separate repo?
>>
>> [1] http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/nepomuk/2012-September/003167.html
>>
>> --
>> Vishesh Handa
>
> For starters, we can probably add conditional compilation, no? Isn't
> that the case? If you need help on the cmake side maybe I can help.
>
> If one of those libraries is "controversial" maybe we should either
> choose not to use it and prefer another instead? Maybe a list of
> dependencies would be interesting for packages to consider them!
>
> In any case, I'm unsure that KDE can shine without ffmpeg.
>
> Aleix

I am sure that ffmpeg is providing some core functionality here. But, 
a distribution like Slackware does not ship a system "ffmpeg" package. 
This is done for various reasons, an important reason being that it 
will make it near impossible to upgrade the system ffmpeg package. It 
is extremely easy to break packages by upgrading a shared ffmpeg 
library they are depending on. For that reason alone, we prefer to 
ship applications with an embedded statically compiled copy of ffmpeg 
when they need it.

Having hard requirements on ffmpeg for your nepomuk indexer would not 
be appreciated by us. Making ffmpeg an optional dependency would be 
better (but will cripple the indexer seriously). I think the best 
solution would be to allow for an optional static binding of ffmpeg 
libraries.

Cheers, Eric

-- 
Eric Hameleers <alien at slackware.com>
Jabber: alien at jabber.xs4all.nl