Re: KDE/jessie feedback
On Sat, Apr 05, 2014 at 05:29:30PM +0200, Sune Vuorela wrote:
> Hi Moritz
>
> Thank you for your mail. I'll go thru your three topics.
>
> > - With the default desktop there're notifications on new updates, but the
> > standard tool (I'm not sure which it is precisely) only offers a
> > notification, but no GUI-way to install the upgrades. I've tried apper and
> > it seems to offer that, maybe that should be the standard tool?
>
> Apper should be pulled in by the kde desktop task and thus available, but I'm
> aiming to replace it with the kubuntu-originating tool 'muon'.
Great! From my experience with non-technical users running KDE the lack of
proper GUI updates is the only technical hurdle of KDE in Wheezy ("if that
thing pops up, you need to run "Konsole" and type in that cryptic message
you wrote down"). If that's fixed that's very nice. muon doesn't seem to
be in sid or experimental, I'll give it some testing once available.
> > - In the default install dragonplayer is installed (and it's a hard
> > dependency from the meta packages). However, with dragonplayer many videos
> > I tried only played the sound of the video, not the actual video. I need to
> > debug that further, maybe there's a dependency missing. Overall mpv seems
> > the superior choice to me (it's not a KDE component, of course, but it
> > integrates very well and it has a clean design while still being very
> > powerful).
>
> We try hard to select packages based on what KDE provides, and dragonplayer is
> the player provided here. Also, I think it is important that the media player
> by default is honoring the settings in System Settings. Only applications
> built upon phonon fully does that.
> Do you have the vlc package installed? Phonon-backend-vlc does have a
> recommends: vlc for helping with video playing capabilities, and Recommends
> should be installed on all normal systems or else you get to keep the pieces.
That in fact fixes it. Maybe a Depends is more appropriate, w/o vlc installed
hardly any of the media files I tested played with video?
> > - One issue we discussed during the security team meeting in Essen is VLC.
> > Upstream focuses on people upgrading to new upstream releases and it's
> > difficult to extract security fixes. Unfortunately VLC builds a library
> > with Phonon being the major user, so upgrading to new upstream releases
> > will break things. Since Phonon also supports Gstreamer as a backend (which
> > is more stable API-wise and supportable), what do you think of switching
> > Phonon over to Gstreamer?
>
> can't you just rebuild phonon if you upload a newer VLC? I guess release team
> don't like transitions in stable, but ...
Unfortunately the VLC API isn't stable, e.g. 2.1.0 made a soname bump. That
would causes quite a bit of churn and we'd really like to avoid to change multiple
reverse deps along with VLC. Working on VLC is tedious enough on its own.
> Phonon-vlc upstream is much more active that the phonon-gstreamer from my
> impression, and phonon upstream does recommend phonon-vlc to be the default.
> But fedora ships phonon-gstreamer as the default.
>
> I do have a preference for not going against upstreams wishes here, so I would
> prefer if we could find a solution where we follow upstream's wishes.
Ok, you should better be following the upstream recommendation for now. Is there
any hope that KDE 5 will move to some QT5 multimedia classes which make VLC
a thing of the past?
Cheers,
Moritz
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