[Linphone-users] Re: FTBFS of linphone 3.1.2 on Fedora 11

[Matěj Cepl]

Dne 21.8.2009 21:05, Simon Morlat napsal(a):
> I'm glad that you decided to upgrade the linphone version of fedora.
> Feel free to ask me in case of troubles, and tell me if I can do something in
> the source package to ease the rpm packaging work.

Thanks for the offer, and let me assure that no good deed will be left 
unpunished :). I have actually two requests -- one simple, other one (I 
am afraid) not so much.

1) it would be really helpful to get that release of ortp out of the 
door. We cannot just drop a package (although linphone is the only 
program using it, right?) and replace it with internal version.

2) The second one is much more problematic I am afraid. So far Fedora 
package has video disabled, and I would like to make it enabled (there 
is so much talk about video communication, that it could greatly help in 
linphone's popularity; I know that it is still rather basic, but I think 
competition is not much better, so it should be worthy).
Unfortunately, linphone seems to depends in compile time on ffmpeg, 
which is absolutely no go in the official Fedora repository. I can see 
four possible solutions for this:

a) Somehow make ffmpeg only runtime dependency for linphone. I am not a 
C programmer (and even less video C programmer) so I have no clue 
whether it is a nonsense, but would it be possible to change linphone so 
that it could be compiled and run even without ffmpeg (and without video 
support in such case), but if somehow ffmpeg (and/or some small special 
bindings) would be installed on the same disk, it would know how to use 
them? Then somebody else could provide such bindings in some other 
unofficial repository in the similar manner how patended codecs (and 
indeed ffmpeg itself) are handled.
b) Switch to something else (e.g., Gstreamer) which has this problem 
already resolved (in the similar manner as in the previous paragraph). 
Probably a silly idea.
c) Probably most realistic right now is just to keep video support 
switched off.
d) Move whole linphone to some unofficial repo. Probably not a good 
idea, because visibility of linphone would hugely decrease.

How is this handled in other distributions? I can see that OpenSuSE is 
also on 2.1.1, and Debian doesn't care about patents, right?

What do you think?

Matěj

P.S.: Is there something wrong with gmane.comp.voip.linphone.user? I 
tried to send the first version of this message there and it got lost 
without any response (not even error message came to my mailbox).
P.P.S.: Putting on CC of this message the Fedora maintainer of linphone. 
Rakesh, what do you think about this?