XBMC packages

[Chris Nolan]

Rolf Fokkens wrote:
> Hi!
>
> On the RPMfusion Wishlist is XBMC
>
> As it's also on my personal wishlist, I created some XBMC packages. 
> They can be found at http://rolffokkens.dyndns.org/. The packages are 
> based on packages by Scott Harvanek, I modified them so XBMC 9.11 beta 
> 1 compiles and runs on Fedora 11 and Fedora 12.
>
> Though my single purpose is to have XBMC for my HTPC project, the 
> packages may also be a starting point for inclusion in RPMfusion. I 
> can assist to make this happen, though I don't have a strong ambition 
> to be a RPMfusion contributor. So positive feedback may stimulate me 
> to make the packages RPMfusion-ready, but I'm perfectly happy with the 
> packages the way they are now.
>
> Cheers!
>
> Rolf
Hi Rolf,

Thanks for the packages and heads up. There are also some packages made 
by somebody else here: http://hansvon.homelinux.org/fedora/ (there are 
many others dotted around the internet too - it's a pretty popular 
software!)

One of the potential problems I've found with packaging this for Fedora 
(in a way that could be included in rpmfusion) is that XBMC doesn't work 
well when you use the external (Fedora) Python libraries. Basically, 
most of the python based plugins (i.e. most of the plugins) break when 
XBMC is compiled with "--enable-external-python" under Fedora.

 From what I can gather it would need a bit of an effort from the 
upstream folks to enable XBMC to work properly with the external Fedora 
python libs, and it would be against the Fedora packaging guidelines to 
allow the RPM to include internal python libs. On a positive note, it 
compiles and runs very nicely using all the other external libs (ffmpeg, 
libmpeg2, libass, libogg etc).

So from an RPM Fusion perspective we'd have a few choices:

1) Package it with the external python enabled and accept that many 
plugins just won't work.
2) Encourage upstream to fix XBMC so it works properly with the external 
python libs.
3) Patch the XBMC source ourselves to make it work with the external 
python libs.
4) Don't include it in RPM Fusion

Option 2 would clearly be the most attractive. I'll try to reach out to 
the XBMC team and see if they have any thoughts on this.

Chris