On Sat, Nov 5, 2011 at 2:02 AM, Yasha Karant <ykar...@csusb.edu> wrote: > I am attempting to install vlc-1.1.11-72.el5.i386.rpm from > http://packages.atrpms.net/dist/el5/vlc/ > > There is a long list of dependencies missing, appended below. Is there a > way to specify to get just these packages from ATrpms without "damaging" the > underlying production EL 5.7 system (e.g., replacing SL packages by other > packages from ATrpms that then cause problems and instability with EL 5.7)? > Is there another add-on EL 5 RPM repository that requires fewer additions > to stock EL 5.7 but still has a vlc 1.x version?
First warning: vlc supports MPEG formats and playing DVD's. There are various patents and reverse engineering legal issues which interfere with open source and especially genuine freeware licensing or deployment of such software. This is why such tools are not in our favorite upstream vendor's codeline, nor will they be, unless such cumbersome licensing can be resolved. Since VLC can typically deal with DVD's, there's the whole libdvdcss sawsuit history that makes it unavailable for our favorite upstream vendor's core distributions. So it's *not* going to work fully without such non-Scientific-Linux provided components, unless our friends at Scientific Linux were to take that on. I don't see a point to that when atrpms and the other repositories are doiing such a good job. That said, if you're in a legal position to use these patented software tools, and you suspect some of the dependencies are extraneous, you can use "mock" to try building the SRPM in a clean SL 5.7 environment. I can send you, or the group, my /etc/mock files for using a local repo for precisely this sort of work. It's much, much, much more efficient to use "mock" from local repositories than reaching out to external mirrors, and different configs to work with JPackage or RPMforge repos as well. This keeps from cluttering your working system with a lot of libraries and dependencies that may cause other adventures. But Yasha, VLC is a powerful and flexible multimedia player, It *needs* access to those libraries in order to manage even half of the different formats and encodings it manages.
