[vlc-devel] Can't Build from Source, want to help with image filters/scaling and quality control

[Neil Woodall]

Let me introduce myself. I'm a Fellow of DSP engineering at  
Pixelworks, Inc (www.pixelworks.com). We build image processing SOC's  
for TV's and projectors. We have started moving our development  
environment from Windows to Linux, so we are looking to replace some  
of our Image processing DSP tools.

I've been trying to evaluate the viability of using VLC as a shell  
for our company's image processing development (which would add ~30  
software/dsp engineers to the list of people working to find and  
solve bugs for VLC along with some methodology engineers for quality  
control), but I've been unable to build the package from source using  
Fedora Core 5. I've tried using the forums for help and emailing this  
list, but without any luck. I've also looked at the commands given to  
the buildbot, searched the web, etc...and can not find a solution.

I finally gave up when trying to duplicate the buildbot set of  
commands I got an error that byte_t was defined twice. Once in / 
extras/contrib/include/libraw1394/raw1394.h and once in  include/ 
vlc_common.h. Since libraw1394 is part of the make src instructions  
(and I could find no other instructions on what to include in extra/ 
contrib... vs. /usr/lib location) this definitely points to a bug in  
the make instructions.

I even downloaded the rpm for 0.8.5 so that I could verify that I had  
all the required shared libraries and still could not build 0.8.5 (or  
0.8.6 or 0.8.6-bugfix or the trunk) from the sources.

I would still like to use VLC as a platform, but unless I can get a  
reproducible process for building the application from the sources,  
which at minimum means producing a step by step set of instructions  
that goes from a clean install of Fedora Core 5 to working  
application, we can not use VLC as a starting point.

If we do use VLC, our contribution to the effort would be to extend  
the image filters and scaling routines to use the Cell SPE's, which  
would give the PS3 users something pretty special, and I would  
probably insist (especially after my experience) that our methodology  
department setup a nightly build(s) to be run on our server farm. We  
would probably also look into actually trying to verify that the  
build works, not just that it makes without errors.

BTW, one thing I would recommend for quality control purposes is to  
change your nightly build process to start with a checkout of the svn  
database to an empty directory for vlc and any source code that would  
be built in the extra/contrib directory. I would also recommend that  
you don't use external servers for getting the source code that is in  
the extra/contrib directory or that you statically link to, but  
instead store a copy on your svn server and get it from there. That  
way when you tag a release, you also tag ALL the make dependencies.

Neil

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