I wanted to blog about this yesterday, but I wasn’t able to find time to do so. Well if somebody hasn’t seen it yet, yesterday VideoLan project released VLC 0.8.4 final. So I started working on putting it in portage. Most of the work was already done as I was able to get all the betas but the last one (that was mainly a fix for Win32 users).
I prepared a couple of extra patches while going with it, tho, and updated the maintainer’s guide according to that. The most important one is letting libdts to be linked as a plugin instead of builtin, so that it does not get linked to the final executable, at least not directly. Currently, vlc-0.8.4 is the target stable for vlc, as it seems to fix most of the bugs we could have found. 0.8.2 version will go away in the next days after I test it more deeply.
There’s also a -r1 version, tho. This version adds hal support (backported from 0.8.4a version that might or might not be released for Linux/Unix), and make ffmpeg a plugin instead of builtin, finally relieving vlc from being linked to a lot of libraries. This still does not remove the builtins completely, as there’s still libtheora and libogg that gets linked and I don’t really like that.
What I’m going to try when I’ll have time is to have also libvlc as a shared object; if I had time, I would probably start looking for adding support into Kaffeine for it, it would be an interesting thing to have at hand, but probably requires lot of tinkering for now 😛
Ah the skins2 interface is now enabled with skins useflag, please test it.
I’m going to take direct maintainership of vlc later today just to make simpler to me looking for vlc bugs and to allow autorepoman to signal me of problems.
Today I’m also letting the last touches to the new revision of flac that cleans up the ebuild and adds the manpages, and obviously cleans up the patches we’re applying. The list of changes can be found on CVS as now all the important patchsets I work on are hosted there.
On another note, I’m happy to see that my idea about the maintainers’ guides does not seem to be dying completely 🙂 Thanks Paul for supporting this 🙂