[mythtv] Building with external libraries (was: Re: libsamplerate 0.1.4)

Colin Guthrie mythtv at colin.guthr.ie
Wed Sep 24 08:42:20 UTC 2008


cal wrote:
> The correct response would be scorn & derision. The update process is trivial (but worth doing I believe). The new high_qual_coeffs.h is 8.8M, so the overall patch runs to 11.5M. Even bzipped, that's not going to sit well on a Trac ticket. C'est la vie.

Just in case it's relevant here, there is a discussion[1] over on the 
freedesktop cross distribution mailing list started by Fedora but 
supported by other distros that talks about encouraging application 
developers to support building with external libraries rather than 
shipping their own copies.

As I am familiar with myth project and how it quite likes to libmyth-ise 
several libraries, I'm interested to hear current opinions on this.

I know that myth makes several, fairly significant modifications to e.g. 
ffmpeg and that could be fairly good reason to ship a copy of that 
library (unless the modifications can and should ultimately go upstream? 
I don't know enough about this bit TBH). But are some of the other 
libraries (e.g. libsamplerate) shipped in myth absolutely necessary or 
have they just been included to quell the rising disquiet from community 
members that complain of "too many dependencies"?

 From an end user wanting to "roll their own" myth compilation, it is 
very handy to have them internally. From a distro packagers perspective 
(e.g. me!) it's a pain to have to recompile something that is already 
available in the system and will receive their own security updates for 
e.g. buffer overflow flaws etc. If a buffer overflow is found in e.g. 
libsamplerate, it's up to the distribution packagers to know and 
remember that they need to also patch the local copy shipped in myth.

The results of the discussions were not that upstreams should be banned 
from shipping their own copies (or even a known good version/snapshot), 
just that they should support configure options of 
--with-system-libsamplerate etc.

So, as a general open question, what are the current thoughts on this?

Col



The Freedesktop Distributions mailing list can be read via Gmane at 
gmane.comp.freedesktop.distributions and the thread I mention above is at:
  [1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.freedesktop.distributions/225


-- 

Colin Guthrie
myth(at)colin.guthr.ie
http://colin.guthr.ie/

Day Job:
   Tribalogic Limited [http://www.tribalogic.net/]
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