I'll get right on it.

I took a look at this and phonon4qt5 subpackage libphonon4qt5 has a 'recommends phonon4qt5-backend', which both this package and phonon4qt5-backend-vlc provide - probably how this one is installed by default (although the vlc backend is not). As such, I think that the existing recommends there should cover it (because the -vlc backend will be the only remaining provider of phonon4qt5-backend) so I guess I probably don't need to change it? But perhaps it would be better if it were more specific? Let me know the right path to take.

Sorry if I'm 'doing it wrong', I'm just a rookie around here with time to spare and a desire to help out, but I might make newbie mistakes.

Fabian Vogt (favogt) - 5 months ago

Yeah, in that case it should be fine.

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pallas wept (pallaswept) - 5 months ago

author

Thanks Fabian, you're always so helpful. Have a great day.

Nice catch!!

I already submitted https://build.opensuse.org/request/show/1139634 earlier

pallas wept (pallaswept) - 5 months ago

author

As they say: Great minds think alike!

I just got an email from the staging bot which said there were two failures:

Generated from http://botmaster.suse.de:8153/go/tab/build/detail/AdiChecker.Factory/54118/Run/1/Run#tab-console

phonon4qt5-backend-gstreamer provides phonon4qt5-backend required by kamerka also provided by phonon4qt5-backend-vlc -> ignoring

phonon4qt5-backend-gstreamer provides phonon4qt5-backend-gstreamer required by patterns-kalpa-base

Error: missing alternative provides for phonon4qt5-backend-gstreamer

The first one seems not to be a real failure, and it does say that it saw the other provider (the vlc backend) and "ignoring" so I guess that one is a false alarm, and does not require further action... but the second one didn't see the vlc backend for some reason - if I understand correctly, it is specifically requiring the backend-gstreamer backend, not just -backend.

I'm afraid this is a little bit "above my paygrade", which is a subtle way of saying I don't really know enough about this, and especially, I don't feel like I have the authority, to take the proper action. I presume similar treatment to your above requests is in order for the kalpa pattern, but I don't feel like I should be playing with that. I don't want to overstep my bounds.

I hope one of you might advise me on this, or take a look at it yourself if you would prefer. I'm sorry to bother you with this, but I just don't want to do the wrong thing, with an important package like that.

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Dominique Leuenberger (dimstar) - 5 months ago

The Kalpa maintainer actually already figured it out:

https://build.opensuse.org/request/show/1139813

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pallas wept (pallaswept) - 5 months ago

author

You guys are absolutely legendary. Thanks so much. If any of you have any suggestions as to how I could better help with packaging, or even you'd prefer I just don't, please do let me know. I'm really keen to help out, I love TW, it's the best of the many *nix I've used since Solaris in '95, (no offence to SLES which paid my bills for a long time haha) and I'd like to give a little something back, and maybe lighten your load a little bit.

Reality is that this is abandoned upstream, hasn't received any fixes for ages and won't in the future. If there is something wrong with the vlc backend, it needs to be fixed.

I can relate to this: all other things aside, I'd prefer to be using gstreamer as a backend myself, and have no real need for VLC. When I first looked at this, my intention was to package required patches into this package, to fix the bugs I've run into... but following the links regarding those patches, the KDE devs were pretty clear that distros should not use it at all, so that's why I filed a deletion request instead. I'm sorry it's causing problems.

Re: issue 1 - The extra disk space required by VLC and its deps is something I can't help much with, that's really a part of the decision made by KDE to change backend, so, way over my head. I'm sorry!

The packman dependencies were a concern, too - we don't want to have everything break for people who aren't using packman. That being said, I checked it out and all of those packman dependencies do exist here on the official repos. I'm guessing that's a hangover from 'opi codecs', but not a problem.

Re: issue 2 - I notice those deprecated FFMPEG libs are also dependencies of a few other packages, seems we're having a hard time shaking them. The vlc-beta package on Packman doesn't have those dependencies, though, so at least from the vlc side, and for this package: when we get an updated vlc, and its matching updated vlc-noX (which is required by phonon4q5-backend-vlc, and is the source of the requirement of those deprecated libs), that should remove the requirement for the deprecated libs, and the updated versions will replace them.

I'll be happy to provide any help I can in meeting that end, just let me know what you'd like me to do. Sorry about this, I didn't mean to cause any trouble. I'll take a look at the gwenview package, too, if you'd like? I imagine it should be a minor change to add a Recommends: to that package. Anything I can do to help, just let me know.

As they say, "Less talk, more action" so I went ahead and made the changes you suggested for the gwenview package: https://build.opensuse.org/request/show/1140614 It's up to that package's maintainers now.

Hi Ilya,

FYI I have revoked the above-mentioned request to add gstreamer-plugins-good to gwenview. The reason is simple - when this gstreamer backend is removed, gwenview will use the vlc backend, and that will play the videos, without need for gstreamer-plugins-*. The gwenview package requires the libphonon4qt5 package, which recommends phonon4qt5-backend, which was formerly provided by the gstreamer backend, and after this change is complete, that recommendation will be filled by the vlc backend, so gwenview video playback will work 'out of the box'.

See the link above to the now-revoked request for the discussion that led to this decision/action, and some details (but not all, I did a lot) of the testing I did to make extra sure it will work for you as intended and anticipated/expected.

I know you're not a huge fan of VLC and the extra diskspace, but the good new is that you'll gain a few MB when you remove this defunct backend, and gwenview will 'just work'. I hope this improves the outcome for you somewhat.

Илья Индиго (13ilya) - 5 months ago

Thank you! vlc in exchange for removing gstreamer-plugins is acceptable.