Gratuitous port splitting (was: Port Avidemux)

[Kevin Oberman]

On Sat, May 23, 2020 at 8:27 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at freebsd.org>
wrote:

> On Friday, 22 May 2020 at 21:38:44 -0700, Kevin Oberman wrote:
> > On Fri, May 22, 2020 at 1:55 PM Wiebe Pestman <wrpestman at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> >> Dear maintainer(s),
> >> Today I tried to install the port avidemux-2.7.4_1, but unfortunately
> >> without success.
> >> When running the command "make install" the whole process proceeds
> >> without any error message.
> >> But at the end there is no binary ...
> >> Neither in /usr/local/bin, nor in
> >>
> >> /usr/ports/multimedia/avidemux/work/stage/usr/local/bin
> >>
> >> Am I overlooking something in the installation procedure?
> >> The kernel on my machine is:
> >>
> >> FreeBSD zwaluw 12.1-RELEASE FreeBSD 12.1-RELEASE r354233 GENERIC amd64
> >>
> >> Hope to get an answer from you :-)
> >> Best regards from Holland,
> >> Wiebe Pestman
> >
> > avidemux does not install any executable. Oddly, it just installs
> libraries
> > and the like. You must also install avidemux-plugins and  either or both
> > avidemux-cli and avidemux-qt5. If you only need the GUI, you can skip
> > avidemux-cli.
> >
> > The command to run the GUI version of avidemux is avidemux3_qt5. The CLI
> > interface is avidemux3_cli.
>
> Yes, I've run into this problem too.  Arguably it's broken.  The
> official documentation expects it to be a single installation, and I
> don't see any reason to split avidemux into five ports (there's also
> avidemux-qt4).  What good is the avidemux port on its own?  Or the
> combination of avidemux-qt5 without avidemux-plugins?  Just finding
> out that you need all this stuff is a pain.  I'd recommend folding
> both of these ports, and probably avidemux-cli, into the ports
> avidemux-qt4 and avidemux-qt5.
>
> At the very least there should be a warning in avidemux/pkg-descr, but
> I don't think that's the right approach.
>
> Thoughts?
>

You are completely right, but this application is weird. It a bear of a
port because it used to include tar files of all of its dependencies due to
ever changing APIs that kept breaking the build. It also makes for a very
messy build that actually is separate builds with a bash script to drive
it. As a result, the creation of four ports was probably somewhat natural.
It's still a bad idea and I have twice worked with committers who wanted to
rework it, but people are busy. Tobias was very helpful to get this port
back into the system after it had been deleted.

I will submit an updated pkg-descr that at least lets people know that they
need to install at least three ports. I hope to do that tomorrow.
--
Kevin Oberman, Part time kid herder and retired Network Engineer
E-mail: rkoberman at gmail.com
PGP Fingerprint: D03FB98AFA78E3B78C1694B318AB39EF1B055683