Curious Multimedia Dependancies

The jokes made about confusing Linux dependancies may at times seem funny, but they reflect a sad truth. After my previous complaint about gui nuisances in Rythmbox, I installed of copy of FC6 - 64bit to a spare partition. Following my own FC6 Guide, I came upon the MP3 section.

Adding MP3 support to Rythmbox (GTK based GNOME media player) requires: yum install gstreamer-plugins-ugly This downloads 7 packages which are less than 1MB and most come from the Livna repository.

However the popular MP3/media player in KDE, Amarok, is not included in the distribution so when you install it your yum command will look like: yum install amarok amarok-extras-nonfree This pulls down 26 packages totalling 31MB!!! However 18MB alone are for the single Amarok package.

The funny thing was near the end of the yum download list:

Updating for dependencies:
 libgpod           x86_64    0.4.2-0.1.fc6   updates     202 k
 rhythmbox         x86_64    0.9.8-1.fc6     updates     4.0 M

So basically installing Amarok with MP3 plugins will require you to install Rythmbox – a totally unrelated media player.

At first this may seem confusing but the real reason for this is the dependancy on libgpod which is a helper library to interface with your iPod. Since amarok requires libgpod as does rhythmbox, an update to libgpod will pull down an update to both media players. While this isn’t very confusing if you take a moment to think about dependancies, it would make someone wonder why they have a GNOME media player when they only use and install KDE applications.

At first I thought it was curious. However most Fedora users know that it is pretty rare to live without any GTK or GNOME apps on their computer. Even if they entirely prefer KDE.

Posted in: FC6, Fedora, Multimedia, Setup, Software,