Plugin package splits

[Iain Lane]

Hi slomo, thanks for replying,

On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 01:57:26PM +0100, Sebastian Dröge wrote:
> On Di, 2014-11-11 at 12:44 +0000, Iain Lane wrote:
> > Hi guys,
> > 
> > Over in Ubuntu (phone) land, the people working on media stuff (based on
> > gstreamer) want to select a few plugins to include by default, without
> > pulling in all of plugins{-good,-bad,-ugly}. It seems to make sense to
> > split the packages to support this kind of usecase. I'd do this on an
> > as-needed basis, *not* by splitting everything, which would create loads
> > of small packages. The main gstreamer1.0-plugins-* would Depend on the
> > split-out packages so that users would get everything if they install
> > those.
> > 
> > The splits that they're asking for are
> > 
> > (Already implemented in Ubuntu) bad → faad, videoparsers
> > ugly → AMR
> 
> What are the reasons for splitting faac (faad is in -ugly, I assume you
> mean faac?) and AMR but keeping everything else?

Actually I don't know what the reasons are, only that there is some kind
of product requirement. I could ask someone else to reply if you want to
find out.

As for faad vs faac (I understood it was encoding that has the potential
legal problems),

(sid-amd64)root at iota:/home/laney# dpkg -L gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad | grep faad
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gstreamer-1.0/libgstfaad.so

> For videoparsers, that makes some sense. But you would also need to
> split off the codecparsers library then, for which there then should be
> a -dev and lib package.
> Upstream the plan is to move the codecparsers library to
> gst-plugins-base at some point, and videoparsers to gst-plugins-good
> then.

The split out videoparsers depends on libgstreamer-plugins-bad1.0-0 for
codecparsers. In practice this hasn't proved a problem for us. If in
future it moves to base (great, then we get it for free as well), this
will become a transitional package.

> I think it would make more sense to first collect reasons for splitting
> things, and then split accordingly. Otherwise we're going to add lots of
> little packages for every reason someone has for splitting something in
> its own package.

I don't know if I think it's a bad idea, if someone has a good usecase.
The "fat" packages have quite large dep chains so you can see why it's
desirable to be able to take only those codecs you want in a resource
constrained environment like a phone.

-- 
Iain Lane                                  [ iain at orangesquash.org.uk ]
Debian Developer                                   [ laney at debian.org ]
Ubuntu Developer                                   [ laney at ubuntu.com ]
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