Re: How to handle required plugins and dbus services for GNOME Programs?

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org> skribis:

> ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) writes:

[...]

>> I can imagine why the plugins package need to be in the profile, but I
>> find the others more surprising.  Do you know what happens?  Are Grilo,
>> GStreamer, and DConf dlopened, or is it just to get the right search
>> path recommendation that they are needed?
>
> Actually, it turns out that 'grilo' doesn't need to be in the profile,
> although if you don't have it you won't get the search path
> recommendation which is crucial for Totem to work properly.

OK.

I wonder if search path recommendations should work “deeper” somehow.
Because currently there’s always a problem when the search path
specification is attached to a library (GST_*, GRL_*) rather than to an
executable (CPATH, GUILE_LOAD_PATH, etc.)

The difficulty is that, ideally, the propagation of search path
specifications would be based on the run-time dependencies, not the
compile-time dependencies.

Thoughts?

> 'gstreamer' is a propagated-input of 'gst-plugins-base', so you don't
> need to explicitly install it and I'm not sure what would happen if it
> were removed.
>
> 'dconf' apparently needs to be in the profile for both GNOME Terminal
> and Totem because of the session dbus service(s) it provides.  Without
> it, modern GNOME programs behave quite badly.  They have no way to
> access or change their own configuration settings, e.g. if you go into
> their preferences, you see checkboxes that do not change their state
> when clicked.

Really?  In Evince, I can change the state of various things (such as
whether or not to view documents continuously), but those changes are
lost across restarts.  However, changes made via dconf-editor are not
lost.  Weird no?

> I'm not sure how best to deal with issues like this, and also with
> things like grilo-plugins and gst-plugins-* that are needed for the
> proper functioning of Totem.  Should we make them propagated-inputs?

Are they required, or is it just that fewer features/file formats are
supported when they’re unavailable?

They could be propagated, but one would still need to know about these
environment variables.

> Or perhaps they should be normal inputs and we should use a wrapper to
> add those directories as suffixes to GRL_PLUGIN_PATH and
> GST_PLUGIN_SYSTEM_PATH automatically?

If they are required, that may be best.

Thanks,
Ludo’.