Re: [gentoo-user] Handbrake: Is it is or is it ain't in portage

[Stroller <stroller@stellar.eclipse.co.uk>]

On 16 Aug 2010, at 01:43, Kevin O'Gorman wrote:

> There's a program I really want to use, and I was hoping it existed  
> in Gentoo.
> It's called handbrake.  eix can't find it.  equery cannot find it.   
> But there's
> a bug (#89432) filed against it, with the last comment (#111) just 4  
> days ago.
>
> So where in the portage is handbrake-0.9.4.ebuild?

To expand on Dale's answer, Handbrake is unlikely ever to be in Portage.

The Handbrake developers use the poor practice of snapshotting the  
upstream libraries they depend upon (I'm not sure if they also patch  
or modify them, instead of pushing those changes upstream) and then  
packaging those libs with Handbrake (in a particularly ugly way, too,  
one might add).

So when you install Handbrake you download a bunch of additional  
libraries (which you likely already have installed on your system) and  
it is compiled against those versions.

The correct way to do this would be for the handbrake developers to  
simply specify which libraries are required and link against the ones  
already installed on your system. If a specific version of a library  
is required - but generally speaking it shouldn't be - then that can  
be done as part of the ebuild / makefile dependency checking.

The link you posted to handbrake-0.9.4.ebuild is an ebuild. You can  
install it something like this:

# mkdir -p /usr/local/portage/media-video/handbrake/
# curl http://bugs.gentoo.org/attachment.cgi?id=229397 > \
      /usr/local/portage/media-video/handbrake/handbrake-0.9.4.ebuild
# ebuild manifest /usr/local/portage/media-video/handbrake/ 
handbrake-0.9.4.ebuild
# emerge handbrake

It's a shitty ebuild, and it has to be, because that's inherent in the  
way the Handbrake devs "package" their program, but the ebuild does  
install and work the way the Handbrake devs intended.

I would have thought you'd already know this if you had fully read bug  
#89432.

I know that transcoding is a bit of a black art, but I'm not convinced  
Handbrake is actually that good.

Stroller.