Multi-level bundling, with a twist

I spent half my Saturday afternoon working on Blender, to get the new version (2.64a) in Portage. This is never an easy task but in this case it was a bit more tedious because thanks to the new release of libav (version 9) I had to make a few more modifications … making sure it would still work with the old libav (0.8).

FFmpeg support is not guaranteed — If you care you can submit a patch. I’m one of the libav developers thus that’s what I work, and test, with.

Funnily enough, while I was doing that work, a new bug for blender was reported in Gentoo, so I looked into it and found out that it was actually caused by one of the bundled dependencies — luckily, one that was already available as its own ebuild, so I just decided to get rid of it. The interesting part was that it wasn’t listed in the “still bundled libraries” list that the ebuild’s own diagnostic prints… since it was actually a bundled library of the bundled libmv!

So you reach the point where you get one package (Blender) bundling a library (libmv) bundling a bunch of libraries, multi-level.

Looking into it I found out that not only the dependency that was causing the bug was bundled (ldl) but there were at least two more that, I knew for sure, were available in Gentoo (glog and gflags). Which meant I could shave some more code out of the package, by adding a few more dependencies… which is always a good thing in my book (and I know that my book is not the same as many others’).

While looking for other libraries to unbundle, I found another one, mostly because its name (eltopo) was funny — it has a website and from there you can find the sources — neither are linked in the Blender package. When I looked at the sources, I was dismayed to see that there was no real build system but just an half-broken Makefile building two completely different PIC-enabled static archives, for debug and release. Not really something that distributions could get much interest in packaging.

So I set up at build my usual autotools-based build system (which no matter what people say it’s extremely fast, if you know how to do it), fix the package to build with gcc 4.7 correctly (how did it work for Blender? I assume they patched it somehow but they don’t write down what they do!), and .. uh where’s the license file?

Turns out that while the homepage says that the library is “public domain”, there is no license statement anywhere in the source code, making it in all effects the exact opposite: a proprietary software. I’ve opened an issue for it and hopefully upstream will fix that one up so I can send him my fixes and package it in Gentoo.

Interestingly enough, the libmv software that Blender packages, is much better in its way of bundling libraries. While they don’t seem to give you an easy way to disable the bundled copies (which might or might not be Blender’s build system fault), they make it clear where each library come from, and they have scripts to “re-bundle” said libraries. When they make changes, they also keep a log of them so that you can identify what changed and either ignore, patch or send it upstream. If all projects bundling stuff did it that way, it would be a much easier job to unbundle…

In the mean time, if you have some free time and feel like doing something to improve the bundled libraries situation in Gentoo Linux, or you care about Blender and you’d like to have a better Gentoo experience with it, we could use some ebuilds for ceres-solver and SSBA as well as fast-C (this last one has no buildsystem at all, unfortunately) all used by libmv, or maybe carve libredcode (for which I don’t even have an URL at hand), recastnavigation (which has no releases) which are instead used directly by Blender.

P.S.: don’t expect to see me around this Sunday, I’m actually going to see the Shuttle, and so I won’t be back till late, most likely, or at least I hope so. You’ll probably see a photo set on Monday on my Flickr page if you want to have a treat.