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Hi XBMC

I have been trying to install XBMC Gotham on my Debian Wheezy. I have only been able to find repo's that are made for Ubuntu, but they dont seem to work - it installs, but I cant get any of the PVR-addons to install and skins for that matter. They all say "Broken" - dependencies missing.

Hope anyone can guide me in the right direction.

Greetings Søren, Denmark...
You have to build it from source.

Start with looking at the documentation concerning dependencies on github.com/xbmc install them and afterwards compile
Thanks - got it build from source and works perfectly!
Hi,
I would like to make Gotham packaged in Debian, thus I feel I don't really
hijack this thread by copying the email I have sent to
[email protected] a few days ago:

Dear XBMC for Linux Team,

I have noticed the sad state of XBMC in Debian. I would like to join the
team to revive it.
I have uploaded [1] a delayed NMU to the version in experimental and I
would like to sponsor the upload [2] at mentors.d.o with a few changes.

Currently Ubuntu packages are not in my scope but with a good version in
Debian Ubuntu packages would be synced up soon automatically.

I'm a DD and I already maintain a few packages. I plan providing
back-ports for xbmc to not leave stable users behind. I do that with
wireshark, too.

Cheers,
Balint

[1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport...=728594#10
[2] http://mentors.debian.net/package/xbmc


The NMU has already landed in experimental since then and I'm wondering
if someone could answer my email here since I feel that the original email
has been lost without reaching team admins.
Hi,
I'm not one of the linux guys but you should re-read the issues raised on the PR on github.
https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc-packaging/p...t-25709741

The issue is that Debian doesn't allow ffmpeg and that is the mains concern/problem. The Debian guys need to be pushed to resolve these issues.

Of course if any of the XBMC team members has any thoughts about this please say so.
Hi,

Thanks for answering. I have read the comments and the lack of ffmpeg in Debian is not an issue, since the proposed package on mentors.d.o makes XBMC compile with libav.
If and when ffmpeg gets reintroduced into Debian, we can switch back to it.
Does debian have the equivalent of ppas so that someone can easily provide debian packages outside the strict debian ecosystem?
XBMC compile with libav != running stable.

You can make anything compile but that does not mean it will actually play like it should. Like already mentioned in the PR we use a lot of custom patches and also ffmpeg isn't the same as libav.
It's not just a matter of smacking libav into xbmc and it will run.
(do note this is not my area of expertise and it may just work fine but i trust the others know what they are talking about)
Problem is concerning support. When something compiles, it does not necessarily mean, that it will run fine. This especially has made severe problems in the past concerning hwacceleration, be it vaapi or even worse vdpau. As most people search support here with us, we would like to have you shipping an xbmc version, that we thoroughly tested, which means one with internal ffmpeg.

Depending on the wide range of libav version out there, there is no guarantee that anything you did not consider will break. See also the ffmpeg patches folder for our current gotham version. Make sure to also port those to your libav/ffmpeg version, as those workaround / fix bugs, that we found during development. Not fixing those bugs in distribution dependend packages will give us a lot of work and at then end ... we will give those users our official ppas.

All these points need to be considered. Nobody has won, if xbmc gets into debian and does not run as intended.
@nickr: No, those PPA-like repos are in the works. There is http://backports.debian.org/ to provide back-ported packages from stable and since I'm a DD I will be able to update to update XBMC there and in unstable as well if I get accepted as a co-maintainer.
All in all for this work-flow there is no need for PPAs.
You should also be the maintainer of libav ... to cherry-pick and integrated upstream patches, especially those they don't resync from ffmpeg.
@fritsch: I see your point and I agree with delivering tested and stable software to users. I also agree with Debian's security guidelines which discourage delivering embedded copies of external projects in packages.
By updating XBMC in Debian only the unstable distribution gets the package automatically which is generally run by people accepting and willing to fix bugs in case of stability problems.
If XBMC's quality is not satisfactory using external libraries it won't get migrated to testing and finally, stable. It also won't get migrated if its dependencies' quality fails the standard.
Debian maintainers also work together on related packages, thus if XBMC triggers bugs in libav it will be reported against libav ain eventually it will get fixed.

Right now XBMC package exists but is fails to install and build in Debian unstable which prevents it from being tested, and being released as part of Debian stable in the future.
There are plenty of integration points between XBMC and the rest of the system and with uploading a working version we could at least start testing it.
Even if the switch to libav turns out to be problematic we could test a lot of other things and switch to ffmpeg when it becomes available with all the necessary fixes.
i don't think you see the big picture here.
Who is going to do the fixing? Not us.
Say there's debian version done with libav. Users come here with problems and we will be chasing ghosts because it's using libav.
Now we won't go and support that version, so who is? We are focused on using ffmpeg and fixing and backporting and sending things upstream.

Quote:thus if XBMC triggers bugs in libav it will be reported against libav ain eventually it will get fixed.
what is eventually? a day, week, months?

We just don't want a highly likely quality issue build floating around. We already have enough things to worry about and i'm sure our video guys just don't want to add libav to list of things. If we find a bug in ffmpeg we try to fix it or send it to ffmpeg and backport the fix into our patches. When we bump ffmpeg part of them can be removed again because it's part of that version.
(2013-12-08, 00:07)fritsch Wrote: [ -> ]You should also be the maintainer of libav ... to cherry-pick and integrated upstream patches, especially those they don't resync from ffmpeg.

libav has plenty of developers and they are actively maintaining libav:
http://packages.qa.debian.org/liba/libav.html

Sometimes you need to maintain a dependency of your package if the dependency becomes unmaintained and I adopted snacc for this reason, but in libav-s case I don't consider this necessary yet.
As long as ffmpeg is not in debian this is not worth looking into.
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