Freedom Issue #3181
[gstreamer] Arch Linux moved plugins to monolithic build and introduced nonfree faac dependency
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Description
- steps to reproduce:
1. Go to https://www.parabola.nu/packages/extra/x86_64/gstreamer/
2. Go to https://www.parabola.nu/packages/extra/x86_64/gst-plugins-base/
3. Go to https://www.parabola.nu/packages/?sort=&repo=Libre&q=gst&maintainer=&flagged=
- expected result:
1. faac is not in the list of dependencies on step #1 and #2.
2. All the gst-plugin* packages from step #3 do not depend on faac and have the same version as gstreamer, because it's a transitive dependency of all of them
- actual result:
1. faac is listed in dependencies on step #1 and #2.
2. packages from step #3 are outdated and will never be updated upstream since they dropped their build recipes. Please find the example in [1]. The reason for that is [2] (moved plugins to monolithic build).
[1] https://github.com/archlinux/svntogit-packages/commits/packages/gst-plugins-bad
[2] https://github.com/archlinux/svntogit-packages/commit/8a3d6262574ce242138338624fb9dd330c6b79c3
History
Updated by Anonymous about 2 years ago
I see faac listed as a virtual dependency. I'm not an expert, but [a thread on the archlinux forum](https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=162983) says that a virtual dependency is something that is not provided by the repositories (and faac is correctly blacklisted). Does this mean that as long as we don't have faac installed we are good? Or will gstreamer crash trying to find the faac files? Or, again, was faac compiled (or statically linked) with gstreamer (which would make the combination non-free)?
As far as I understand, the first point would not be a problem as gstreamer would continue to work without any issues, the second would be a bug, but not a freedom issue, while the third case would be a problem.
I'm just making some questions as I have gstreamer installed and this issue is not new.
Updated by bill-auger about 2 months ago
- Assignee set to bill-auger
- Status changed from unconfirmed to in progress
just for documentation, ive been continuing to build the packages which were originally a separate PKGBUILD and upstream repo from the main gstreamer, by carefully avoiding to build the other packages - it seems that is no longer possible - the build of 'gst-plugins-bad' has a strict build dependency on 'gstreamer' at the same version as itself of yes, kinda weird - that is o/c impossible to satisfy; but apparently, as long as 'gstreamer' is compiled first, the build system will magically accept it to satisfy the 'gst-plugins-bad' build - so now, we need to blacklist and rebuild the entire gstreamer suite
these were never given a BR reference in the blacklist; so i assign this one