[Delta] Managing GStreamer and dependencies

[Justin Karneges]

On Thursday 13 November 2008 03:23:13 Pau Garcia i Quiles wrote:
> Quoting Justin Karneges <justin-psi2 at affinix.com>:
> > 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.
[snip]
>
> 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).

PsiMedia uses qmake, so that's no problem.  GStreamer (and related), on the 
other hand, could benefit from being easier to build.

I think one of the big issues with putting together GStreamer is 
knowing /what/ to build.  There are so many optional features and 
sub-libraries.  Don't forget to compile in Speex support, you know?  And that 
means setting up libspeex first.

I'd say the two problems to be solved are:

  1) Knowing what to build, and building it all at once (otherwise building 
every little part is a chore).  This is sort of a meta-packaging problem.  
For example, it would be convenient if there were one GStreamer+dependencies 
source package, containing everything, which only required one build step.

  2) Simplifying/unifying the build system.  Converting the builds of 
GStreamer and all of the dependencies to something like cmake or qmake could 
obviate the need to deal with autoconf, etc, on Windows and could make the 
build process uniform regardless of the compiler (Visual Studio, MinGW).  If 
done with qmake then we could even bundle the result in Psi.

Or.... we could just distribute binaries. :)

If you want to provide a cmake-buildable source package that solves #1 and #2, 
I think that would be excellent.  Extra points if you used qmake, but I don't 
know if bundling GStreamer inside Psi is really that necessary (for example, 
Qt does not do this for Phonon).

-Justin