[Freewx-maint] Bug#588104: libwx_gtk2u_media-2.8.so.0 missing from libwxgtk2.8-0(2.8.10.1-3)

[Olly Betts]

On Sun, Jul 04, 2010 at 01:53:37PM -0700, Simon Tan wrote:
> Attempting to execute a ruby script leads to error: 
> /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/wxruby-2.0.0-x86_64-linux/lib/wxruby2.so: libwx_gtk2u_media-2.8.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory - /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/wxruby-2.0.0-x86_64-linux/lib/wxruby2.so (LoadError)
> 	from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `require'
> 	from /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/wxruby-2.0.0-x86_64-linux/lib/wx.rb:12
> 	from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:36:in `gem_original_require'
> 	from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:36:in `require'
> 	from 1.rb:2
> 
> The code to the ruby script looks like this(copied from wxWidgets):
>  require "rubygems"
>  require "wx"
>  include Wx 

I've been looking at the issues involved here.

It appears you're using a precompiled wxRuby gem which was built on a
machine with wxwidgets compiled with different options to those used in the
Debian package.  The INSTALL file for wxRuby actually covers this issue
(see the last sentence of the quote):

    wxRuby is fully supported on Ruby 1.8 and Ruby 1.9.1. There are two
    ways of installing wxRuby2:

     * Using Rubygems to install a precompiled binary gem
     * Obtaining the sources and compiling wxRuby yourself

    For most users (especially on Windows and OS X), using rubygems will be
    most convenient, and is recommended. Compiling may be needed on systems
    which have very varied configurations (in particular, Linux).  [...]

Unfortunately the most recent wxRuby release insists on SWIG <= 1.3.38, and
even squeeze has 1.3.40, so you can't actually build it from source with
the packaged versions dependencies in either Debian stable or unstable, but
that's something the wxRuby developers need to address.

Just re-enabling wxMediaCtrl would mean dragging in gconf which was rather
unpopular (http://bugs.debian.org/493090) so we definitely don't want to
return there.

Re-enabling and creating a new binary package to hold just this library
seems over-kill.  Nobody appears to have offered *any* examples of software
people actually want to use which actually needs wxMediaCtrl - the wxRuby
gem has this dependency not because it wants wxMediaCtrl, but because it
defaults to wrapping the wxWidgets API features which were enabled in the
library it was built against.  Adding another binary package to the Debian
archive seems the wrong way to fix that.

Cheers,
    Olly