[Delta] Managing GStreamer and dependencies

[Pau Garcia i Quiles]

Quoting Justin Karneges <justin-psi2 at affinix.com>:

> The introduction of GStreamer as a dependency complicates things.  Psi is
> generally known as being easy to build.  If you were even slightly
> inconvenienced by something like QCA, then GStreamer will be a living hell.
>
> When I first started looking at GStreamer awhile back, I gathered the source
> of all of the dependencies we needed, converted all the builds from autotools
> to qmake, and packed it all into one bundle.  The intent was to make it
> possible for people compiling Psi to easily build GStreamer as well, without
> any fuss.  Of course, this was also not very maintainable.
>
> Thinking about it now, I guess it's not really that important for   
> everybody to
> be compiling GStreamer.  It's easy enough to get GStreamer for Linux with apt
> or whatever, and for Windows and Mac it may be enough to distribute binaries.
> Fortunately there are already efforts on the binaries front, such as
> Collabora's OABuild.
>
> My tentative plan, then, is for the Delta project to "officially" provide
> GStreamer binaries for Windows and Mac, possibly leveraging an upstream
> binaries source.  Not every GStreamer module will be included, just the ones
> that we need.
>
> An open question is how we should distribute the PsiMedia provider plugin.  I
> suspect some distributions may want to split out the plugin, so that a
> non-multimedia-enabled Psi is still possible.  For example, I could easily
> see Debian having 'psi' and 'psi-plugin-media' packages (where the second has
> all the GStreamer dependency hoopla).  However, just because distributions
> might like to make two binary packages doesn't mean we necessarily want to
> offer two source packages.
>
> What I figure we could do is put everything in one source package, and if
> GStreamer is detected by configure then you'll get both Psi and the plugin.
> You could then create two distro packages out of these results if you wanted.
> Building just Psi would be possible of course.  Additionally, we could have
> a --media-plugin-only option to configure which lets you build /just/ the
> plugin.  This might be useful for Gentoo, if you already have Psi built but
> now you want to emerge just the plugin.

I could provide a CMake build system for GStreamer and PSIMedia, if  
you are interested. Would that work your you? That certainly makes  
things easier on Windows and Mac (and Linux, too).

-- 
Pau Garcia i Quiles
http://www.elpauer.org
(Due to my workload, I may need 10 days to answer)