dependency management in stable releases
#1
Hi XBMC team,

Thank you for your excellent product. I enjoy using XBMC weekly.

I'm a co-maintainer for the RPM Fusion XBMC package, and recently I ran into a dependency issue when updating XBMC from 12.0 to 12.1 on Fedora.

Similar to Debian, Fedora's Packaging Guidelines prohibit bundled libraries (link), so we can't ship the libcec fork in the XBMC tree. Ordinarily this is not a problem; XBMC 12.0 worked with the libcec 2.0.5 package as shipped in Fedora 18. However, when XBMC 12.1 was released, it had a hard dependency on libcec 2.1. When we upgraded to 12.1 on Fedora 18, the package could no longer support libcec on that Fedora release.

A Fedora user has filed an RFE to ask the libcec maintainer to update his package in Fedora 18 (link), and it's possible that he'll be generous and agree to push the update.

However, I am also interested in respectfully letting you know about the situation. I was not expecting such a bump during a minor point release. On some levels, this certainly "comes with the territory" of trying to follow strict Packaging Guidelines on Linux distros, and I readily accept that dependencies have to be bumped from time to time. All the same, I think it's important for packagers and upstream devs to regularly communicate, and perhaps that communication can be more general, like this post. I'm posting this with the hope that you may take what I'm saying into consideration for future stable releases.

XBMC has come a long way towards unbundling several libraries, and I'd be amiss if I didn't say "thanks!" too for all that work.

- Ken
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#2
there is no libCEC fork in XBMC's tree. I suspect you're mistaking lib/libcec to be some fork. it's not, and that one is used to build libCEC bundled with XBMC on android and osx/ios (so not fedora's concern)

and yes, there's a dependency on libCEC 2.1.0 or higher, even if you may not expect it with a minor bump. the main reason was that device detection didn't work (properly) on OS X with firmware version 2 or up of the CEC adapter, and in order to fix that, we are now using libCEC's own device detection, rather than dupe it (partially) in XBMC. and that required libCEC 2.1.0 or higher.

so just bump both a be happy ;-)

regards, Lars (author of libCEC)
opdenkamp / dushmaniac

xbmc-pvr [Eden-PVR builds] [now included in mainline XBMC, so no more source link here :)]
personal website: [link]

Found a problem with PVR? Report it on Trac, under "PVR - core components". Please attach the full debug log.

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#3
@ktdreyer, any chance you can pop by irc at some point? i'd like to chat about some packaging related stuff and.. forums are not the medium.

if so, please ping cptspiff @ freenode. i have a bnc so always online. not always there though obviously..
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dependency management in stable releases0