[elrepo] EL6 fglrx devel packages?

[Andy]

Phil Perry wrote:
> On 18/05/12 03:05, Andy wrote:
>> Anyway, I was also wondering if you are interested in adding the fglrx VA-API
>> backend package to Elrepo, since you have libva and you have the fglrx drivers
>> but not the missing link between them.
>>
> 
> I'm not an ATI/AMD fglrx user. Is VA-API similar to VDPAU on the nvidia 
> platform?

Yes and no, VA-API is a generic high-level video acceleration API that can
also sit on top of VDPAU (there is a VA-API VDPAU backend too, and I intend to
package that up at some point too).
XvBA is the ATI/AMD equivalent of VDPAU (the XvBA library is included in the
fglrx driver package from AMD unlike libvdpau which is distributed separately).

There is some Linux software that only supports VA-API, not directly VDPAU,
most notably VLC, so VA-API (with the VDPAU backend) is needed even for Nvidia
users of VLC.

>> I have built the package, and it works fine with VLC 2.0.x from my repo
>> ( pkgrepo.linuxtech.net/el6/ ),
> 
> Great - then as you have done the hard work, why don't I invite you to 
> officially maintain the package in elrepo. Would you be willing to do that?

Yes I can do that, I just would need to know what rules/formalities that
implies. So far I have only ever packaged for my own repo, never for a
community repo (which obvioulsy has it's own rules / guidelines / restrictions
/ procedures, etc...)

> We would also be really interested to hear from anyone willing to 
> maintain the fglrx packages too!

I'm actually quite glad that Elrepo provides that for EL so I don't have to
deal with that! :-)
More seriously, unfortunately I can't commit to that as the releases are too
frequent and the package is quite complex (therefore would require too much
time on a regular basis that I cannot afford).
I'm already struggling with the Seamonkey package which has too frequent
releases and is a beast to maintain...

>> Which solves the issue but of course it's an ugly hack.
> 
> If it works for now... :-)

True, but I hate ugly hacks, they bug me especially when I know that there
must be a proper solution but I can't figure it out...

> What about el5? Can (should?) we do this for el5 too?

Personally I don't use EL5 at all (therefore I package only for EL6) and as
far as I can see you don't even have libva for EL5 in Elrepo so I would say
no. Also I very much doubt that people still use EL5 on a desktop system,
these days EL5 is surely only still in use on servers that need to stay with
that release for stability/compatibility reasons.

> Well, perhaps the best way to ensure that is if the same person 
> maintains them in both repos :-)

Agreed. :-)

Please let me know (probably best via private email) what I need to do to
become the Elrepo maintainer of this package (and probably also of xvba-sdk
which is a required dependency).

Regards,
Andy