Miro

Miro - an ancient African word meaning "I thought compiling software from source was easy".

Or:

Miro - a trainwreck of a project

Don't get me wrong; I used to have a copy of Democracy Player and I appreciated that it was rather nice. I didn't have the bandwidth at the time to really take advantage of it.

Now I've got 5 gigs per month, I decided to use it by watching some Internet TV. Miro (formerly known as Democracy Player) was my first choice.

I apt-getted it, and it promptly crashes shortly after starting it up. I found that a vastly newer version had been released, so I decided to use the official Miro repo. Bad idea. It wanted to downgrade libxine, which is especially stupid considering I didn't even have the latest backported version! I decided to go from source. When I had a look I found that Miro appears to be written in Python - "this will be easy", I thought.

I have downloaded about 30 megabytes of dependencies so far, and every time I run the installer script it complains about something else. NOW it's complaining about OpenSSL! It seems to require vast tracts of libboost, libxine, even X11 development libraries! It's almost as though Miro requires everything *except* anything that comes with Ubuntu.

I even thought I'd be smart and do "sudo apt-get build-dep miro" to make sure I had everything. But no... it downloaded 11 megabytes of stuff, but it seems that it didn't download anything that I needed.

Hmm... now that I've installed libssl-dev, the compile seems to be chugging away happily. But it's taken a lot of investigative skills to find all the dependencies. The project is a trainwreck. Firstly, the Miro crash is a known problem, which shouldn't have made it to any sort of release. Second, the packaged version of Miro from the offical Miro repo should be able to accept newer versions of libxine. Third, I'd appreciate knowing exactly what to download to build this thing. Fourthly, once I've compiled Miro, it SHOULDN'T FUCKING SEGFAULT ON STARTUP!