Bug#87667: Still packaging gstreamer?
On Wed, Jun 20, 2001 at 06:13:18PM -0400, David I. Lehn wrote:
> I put the debs up for download the other day:
>
> http://gstreamer.net/releases/current/debian/
I've looked over these packages; see comments below.
> I've got some more changes and fixes going up soon. Haven't put the
> latest debian control info into gst cvs yet either. Kind of hard to do
> that since by the time I get it packaged these guys already have new
> plugins written. ;) Should probably be maintaining main release and
> cvs versions or something... will stabalize sometime I suppose.
It can be difficult to try to maintain Debian packaging infrastructure in line
with actual development of the software. The usual approach is to sync the
packaging to official releases and maintain it on a branch, so that
packaging-specific changes can be pushed out without need for a complete
release.
> There are some issues left. Like some weird lintian errors about PIC
> code on just about every plugin. Tried to figure that out a couple
> months ago with no luck. Something to do with a failure in a grep of
> objdump output. Shared lib details a little too low level for me I'm
> afraid. I should ask debian-mentors about it. Also a bunch of warnings
> about .so links in non-dev packages. Will have to override that since
> that's the way the gstreamer people want plugins to be (versioned
> instead of just the .so).
lintian tries to verify that .so objects were compiled with -fPIC, as is
required for proper shared library operation. It has been mistaken in the
past, but I think it's pretty reliable now. You should double-check that every
object that is going into the .so was compiled with -fPIC. automake/libtool
mostly take care of this, but it is easy to accidentally slip in non-PIC code.
Since they will never be dynamically linked, I assume (only dlopen()ed), for
what reason do they want to version them? If the idea is to keep track of the
versions of individual plugins, I recommend using the -release flag to libtool,
which will give names like "libgstriff-0.2.0.so" or what have you.
> And I suppose I'll get yelled at for the plugin package explosion... not sure
> how else to deal with this monster.
I don't think anyone would scream too loudly if you just rolled all of the
plugins into one binary package. If plugins can be disabled, or gstreamer can
otherwise function alright without loading all of them, you can simply demote
the plugins' dependencies to Recommends, allowing the user to exclude them if
they want to. That would be preferable to having twentysomething plugin
packages, in my opinion.
> Yeah, I'm interested in a sponser. I've been slacking on getting through the
> new maintainer queue. I really need to get that done soon. Still need my
> key signed... will probably get that done at OLS.
Once you have something that you feel is ready for release into Debian, let me
know, and I'll check it over and sponsor the upload.
Good luck!
--
- mdz
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