gst-plugins-good0.10 package

[David I. Lehn]

* Sebastien Bacher <seb128 at debian.org> [2005-12-19T18:39:39-0500]:
...
> * the different sinks:
> gstreamer0.10-aa, gstreamer0.10-auto, gstreamer0.10-caca,
> gstreamer0.10-esd, gstreamer0.10-oss 
> 
> * the misc package:
> gstreamer0.10-misc-good
...
> The Depends are:
> Depends: gconf2 (>= 2.12.1-4ubuntu1), libavc1394-0 (>= 0.5.0), libc6 (>=
> 2.3.4-1), libcairo2 (>= 1.0.2-2), libdv4, libflac7, libgconf2-4 (>=
> 2.11.1), libglib2.0-0 (>= 2.9.1), libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-0 (>=
> 0.10.0), libgstreamer0.10-0 (>= 0.10.0), libjpeg62, liboil0.3 (>=
> 0.3.3), liborbit2 (>= 1:2.10.0), libpng12-0 (>= 1.2.8rel), libraw1394-5,
> libshout3, libspeex1, libvorbis0a (>= 1.1.2), libxml2 (>= 2.6.22),
> zlib1g (>= 1:1.2.1)
> 
> Any comment on the current split? Should we move some of -misc? 
> The current Depends are quite reasonable. Is there some people wanting
> to run applications without this package? libgstgconfelements.so and
> the .schemas are shipped with it and required by the applications, if
> that's the case we may want to create a -gconf too (according to the
> misc requirements I'm fine with both way and that's probably fine for
> other people as well)
> 

Back when I first did the -misc seperation the dependencies were just
simple things that ~99% desktop users would have installed already.  It
kind of balloned up to a bigger list because as gstreamer plugin scope
increased it seemed silly to create a new deb for each dependency.  I
had always hoped to revist the problem and have a better solution
magically appear.

Are you making a top level -plugins-good package that depends on
everything else?  Should there be a core -plugins package that depends
on the -plugins-good, -plugins-bad, -plugins-ugly, -ffmpeg, etc
packages?  Ie, something to install all of gstreamer.

Why should sinks get special packaging and not sources or codecs?

>From an end users perspective the delta pain of the few sink plugin deps
above is probably not that bad.  Why not just throw them all into
gstreamer0.10-plugins-good?

I've always wondered if the kitchen sink approach is really going to
bother anyone.  I never had any data from my earlier work if anyone
really cared that it was split up.  I always imagined 99% of the users
would install everything via the top level -plugins package.  But I
really don't know.  People don't seem to complain too much about all the
crap GNOME and KDE desktops pull in.

Cons of uber package:
- Bloat
- Lots of deps, may not need many of them
- Bloat
- Must deflect users complaining about deps
- One broken lib can cause whole package to be uninstallable

Pros of uber package:
- Disks bigger and networks faster these days. (kind of lame argument)
- Packaging is _much_ easier.  I burned out on it.
- Users will have everything installed. "Batteries Included"
- Easier for gstreamer apps to depend on a few packages rather than
  every codec, sink, source, etc they may want to use.

-dave