So, I wanted to provide to my Gentoo users a new version of xine-ui with a few corrections, especially since I was able to turn off -fno-strict-aliasing applied to the whole code, and there are a few bugs that I couldn’t reproduce that might be fixed now, as I’ve tried to fix a few border line cases that were throwing warnings.
Unfortunately, when I gone looking for packaging xine-ui, I’ve seen that its configure.ac was really a good mess of stuff. For that reason, I’ve now updated all of it, making it human readable, consistent and possibly faster.
Basically what I ended up doing was to update switches to use AS_HELP_STRING for the help strings outputted on ./configure —help, so that it does not look like crap on autoconf 2.60, and to replace custom checks when possible with standard ones. Three test were moved from the previous custom ones to pkg-config checks. That is a good thing coming out of gnome at least 😉 The tests were for libpng, xine-lib and curl, the new code looks way better.
I also dropped the support for libtool, as xine-ui does not install any shared library, so it made no sense to use it. The result is quite good as the code reduction in the generated configure file is notable; from 1.1MiB to less than 500KiB. This is not bad at all.
Also when removing libtool I found that the console utilities ended up linking against X11 when configured to build X11 ui too. This is now fixed in CVS.
Unfortunately there seems to be a few more things that does not work as intended in the current autotools code, so I’m working on clean that up, too. If all goes well, a snapshot will be in tree by night and it will take way less time to build 🙂
If I end up correctly preparing this stuff, I’ll try soon also to clean up the configure.ac for xine-lib, to make it faster, too, but that is going to take quite some time as a lot of that stuff cannot be easily changed as it has quite complex dependencies.
On a different note, today I received the replacement of the DVD from Amazon (and yesterday I sent out the one I received), this time it was sealed, latched and perfectly working 🙂 Yai! 🙂
And a final note, I’ve decided to buy the 9250 card, so that I can use the radeon driver, and get rid of the binary nVidia driver. I’ll consider it an investment.