Bug 30555 – The new gst-plugins-0.6.3 setup

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

[Description alex f 2003-10-07 04:54:25 UTC]

For gst-plugins-0.6.3 a new setup was found where each plugin will become its own ebuild. If somebody wants to have mad, oss, vorbis, alsa then he needs to built:

media-libs/gst-plugins-0.6.3
media-plugins/gst-plugins-oss-0.6.3
media-plugins/gst-plugins-gnomevfs-0.6.3
media-plugins/gst-plugins-vorbis-0.6.3
media-plugins/gst-plugins-mad-0.6.3
media-plugins/gst-plugins-alsa-0.6.3 (doesn't exist yet)

While this kind of setup provides individuality for users it slows down the build process _a lot_. It took me almost four times longer than with the old setup, since for every plugin the _whole_ gst-plugins tarball has to be md5 summed and unpacked to the work directory. But what takes most of this times is the ./configure step which goes through _all_ plugins to create Makefiles. This is a _massive_ amount of useless time consuming repetition.

Why wasn't a USE flag approach chosen?

[Comment 1 foser (RETIRED) 2003-10-07 07:12:48 UTC]

well one of the reasons here you mention yourself unknowingly, the alsa plugin
is broken. Now we can make a selective choice on what we want to include
and what not. But the real reasoning was explained in a -dev mail not too
long ago and very short in the eclass.

That it takes more time is a trade-off we know, but it's the one thing or
the other.

I dunno why you want to discuss this now it has been long implemented and
even went stable with little more as an argument than that it takes a relatively
long to configure per plug-in (hardly an issue for most people). Discussion
is good, but if you were truly interested i had expected feedback at least
a while back and something well argued.

Oh and why we moved away from the USE flag approach : it had proven to be
unusable over time in this case with the enormous amount of plugins and now
gstreamer has become more of a mainline lib it became more and more of a
bottleneck.