Preventing the qt-phonon vs phonon block

Posted on 3 Jun 09 at 23:46 | Tagged as , ,

We’ve had an unfortunate situation with x11-libs/qt-phonon and media-sound/phonon blocking each other on Gentoo (bug 270188). KDE and Nokia Qt Software each make their own releases of the Phonon library, and while these are largely the same, there are some minor differences. KDE4 users want media-sound/phonon, while the Gentoo Qt team has always insisted that for non-KDE users x11-libs/qt-phonon should be the default choice as dependency of other Qt modules. Now Qt can also use media-sound/phonon, but the Qt3Support module needs the gstreamer back-end enabled. This has led to some useflag dependencies that trip up portage.

At the last project meeting we decided to introduce a kde useflag to force selecting media-sound/phonon instead of qt-phonon for KDE users. Now that both Qt 4.5.1 and phonon-4.3.1 are stable, or soon to be stabilized (depending on how quick or slow the arch testers are for the architecture that you’re using), enabling the kde useflag (if you want to use KDE4) should give you a smooth upgrade path, without any qt-phonon related blocks. If you don’t have nor want kdelibs on your system, you should disable the kde useflag, and you will get qt-phonon, which is preferred by Qt.

And if you want to prevent media-sound/phonon from pulling in gstreamer, then disable its gstreamer useflag, and make sure to also disable the phonon useflag for x11-libs/qt-qt3support. This will then disable the phonon options in qtconfig, but you can still configure phonon in KDE’s systemsettings.

If you still have any issues, please comment on the bug.

4 comments

  1. Matthias on 5 Jun 09 at 00:08:

    Thanks, this solved the problem for me.

  2. salman on 17 Jun 09 at 12:02:

    very helpful
    thanks a lot

  3. Daniel on 16 Oct 09 at 03:33:

    erm, I have -kde in my make.conf and it still has a conflict between qt-phonon and media-sound/phonon

    This is really annoying because I cannot do emerge -Dauvt world anymore. It pulls in tons of packages I do not want nor need.

  4. Daniel on 16 Oct 09 at 03:39:

    lol, fixed it already with help from other websites, I just put media-sound/phonon into package.mask, problem solved.

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