Arch Linux

did you tried to split this into libvlc and vlc to see if it works?

i just tried using vlc-plugin with only libvlc and it requires plugins that are available in vlc to work.

here is some packages to try. i have a clue that this split is useless.

http://pkgbuild.com/~ioni/vlc

1) test if phonon builds only with libvlc installed
2) test if phonon works with only libvlc installed

To be honest Wonder, I'm not skilled enough to make my own PKGBUILDs yet :(.

I haven't tried those packages yet, but maybe it wasn't working because the dependencies that are in the vlc package should be in the libvlc package?

not really, it tries to open the plugins which provides support for video formats

http://pastie.org/1335157

i was looking at how ubuntu does it and it seems it doesn't include any plugins in libvlc and phonon vlc backend has vlc as dependency.

I didn't look into Ubuntu, but I did look at Deb Squeeze: "http://packages.debian.org/testing/phonon-backend-vlc"

They've got the package split in a lot of ways: "vlc-data", "libvlccore4", "libvlc5", "vlc", "vlc-data" etc. What a nightmare!

It should definitely be possible according to the VideoLAN wiki: "http://wiki.videolan.org/Libvlc"

lets postponed this. i was talking with vlc devs today and they suggested to pack libvlc+modules and gui(which is vlc).

since you have already qt, it doesn't cut your dependencies at all and is complicating packaging.

That's ok. I thought it might have been an easy thing but if it's too difficult, it's no issue :).

cantata 2.0 now depends on libvlc.so.5. I’m not sure whether it could be build and works with only it (and this file own dependencies), but I think so according to cantata README. It would be very nice not to pull vlc and all its dependencies if all what is needed is just that library.

EFL has now merged emotion generic players into it.
Emotion generic players requires vlc to be used as a back end for apps (terminology, rage), and just like phonon-vlc the gui isn't necessary.
It would be nice to have efl as well as phonon-vlc and others, to be packaged without requiring the end user to have the vlc gui (which in turn requires qt) to be installed on their systems as well.
Ubuntu (debian), mageia, suse, rpmfusion (fedora, centos, etc.), and others, all have split up packages for vlc, IMHO I think we should as well.

I totally agree with AJSlye just because i don't really like Vlc even if i use qt for other things !

vlc doesn't require Qt anymore

No but the GUI does, and making qt an optional depend is not an ideal solution either.
When you install VLC the menu entry for the gui is created, and without QT installed it crashes (doesn't load).
Not very user friendly IMHO.

I would also like to see a splitted VLC and libvlc package. There are currently some packages that depend on VLC as a library, but the whole VLC is pulled when installing, for example: cantata, kaffeine, phonon-qt4-vlc and phonon-qt5-vlc, only considering the official package and not AUR packages.

They still mostly require VLC decoder and other plugins/engines and for sure i wont split out every single plugin into a own optional dependency.
so the only thing that makes sense to split out is vlc binary itself and only for the reason that QT is automatically pulled in via hard-dependency for it.

Note that everything in our repos that depends on libvlc (except for phonon-qt4, which will be gone soon) also depends on Qt5, so this won't be as important once VLC uses Qt5.

VLC uses QT5 in 3.0, which im currently packaging. Honestly i don't even see a real reason to split it then, its hassle for no true gain. just going to add qt5 as a hard dependency and call it a day.

A reason could be that when one needs libvlc, for example as a Cantata dependency, the VLC player get's pulled in, adding the desktop files, changing media files opening priorities, etc., when the original intent was to install Cantata for music playing. Having libvlc as another package would solve this.

The fact that XDG mimeapps.list preferences falls back on mimeinfo.cache for stupid reasons, is not a reason to split up packages just to avoid installing the desktop file.