I hope nobody at VideoLan project will get mad at me. VLC is a great software and I’m using it without problem on OSX, what I’m going to tell here is just a way to express the frustration of a package maintainer when upstream (for some reason) is not hearing him.
Ok let’s start from the start (as usual). At the firsts of June I added to portage a 0.8.2_beta2 version of VLC, using the test2 tarball VideoLan project release. Unfortunately that wasn’t working on AMD64: from version 0.8.1 they enabled by default the x86 extensions like MMX, MMX2, SSE and SSE2 on AMD64 systems, this is a good thing but they done it in the wrong way. The CPU detection code wasn’t working at all, so I fixed it with some help from other Gentoo/AMD64 devs, and sent them a patch in Videolan bug #2078. That patch wasn’t applied on 0.8.2, and we need to apply it again on 0.8.2 final version on Gentoo.
Now I’m having a bit of a problem with mozilla plugin: the link fails because it must create a shared (.so) library, but there’s a non-PIC enabled library in the link input. It took me quite a bit of checks with Danny to find out the why of that as the commandline used to compile the source code had -fPIC in it.. the problem is that the MMX asm code used there is not PIC-enabled and that means that the code is not going to work at all until it’s fixed for PIC support.
I’ve searched for a dev in #videolan on FreeNode but seems nobody’s there, then I reported a new bug for them and now I’m looking for a workaround.
If you’ll see mozilla useflag in media-video/vlc would mean I’ve fixed it 🙂