Bug#566924: vlc-nox: Please lower Depends: libavc1394-0, libraw1394-11

[Christophe Mutricy]

Le Tue 02 Feb 10 à 10:05 +0100, Reinhard Tartler a écrit :
> >> The slightly good news is that due to the modular nature of vlc if you
> >> remove libavc1394-0 and libraw1394-11 forcefully you won't break vlc
> >> 
> >> (you should keep libdvbpsi however . It's needed to play MPEG2 TS files)
> >
> > Oh I thought that's exactly the situation where one could
> > differentiate dependencies, and have vlc-nox only Recommends:
> > libavc1394-0 and libraw1394-11 (because vlc can do without, and if
> > they're just recommendend I could uninstall them without fiddling with the
> > package management);
> 
> This does only work if vlc was loading those libraries at runtime. If
> that is/was indeed the case, then we could do somthing similar like in
> the xine-lib package ages ago.
> 
> If vlc is linked dynamically at those libs, then it would crash at
> startup as ld-linux.so would fail to bootstrap the image.
> 
> xtophe, can you clarify here?

VLC laods its modules at runtime so technically we could move all the
depends to recomends except libvlc, libvlccore, libc6, libpthread,
libdbus, libdl, libhal and libm

But you'll have a pretty useless vlc.

So in any case we are back to quantifying how important a module is.

Then for "not important" module we have the choice of:
 - Putting it in its own package (vlc-plugin-dv, vlc-plugin-bonjour)
 - Grouping some modules in one package (vlc-extra-access,
   vlc-extra-servicediscoveries)
 - Relaxing some depends to recommends


The third solution would bring some packaging fun . (Hmmm checking
dpkg-shlibdeps' manpage there is some option to manage that)
I'm also not sure if all the users would realise the Recomends are quite
important. But we could try to educate them in reportbug control files.



-- 
Xtophe