Herostratus’ legacy

words from a lazy coder

From gst-build to local-projects

Two years ago I wrote a blog post about using gst-build inside of WebKit SDK flatpak. Well, all that has changed. That’s the true upstream spirit.There were two main reason for the change:

  1. Since the switch to GStreamer mono repository, gst-build has been deprecated. The mechanism in WebKit were added, basically, to allow GStreamer upstream, so keeping gst-build directory just polluted the conceptual framework.
  2. By using gst-build one could override almost any other package in WebKit SDK. For example, for developing gamepad handling in WPE I added libmanette as a GStreamer subproject, to link a modified version of the library rather than the one in Flatpak. But that approach added an unneeded conceptual depth in tree.

In order to simplify these operations, by taking advantage of Meson’s subproject support directly, gst-build handling were removed and new mechanism was set in place: Local Dependencies. With local dependencies, you can add or override almost any dependency, while flatting the tree layout, by placing at the same level GStreamer and any other library. Of course, in order add dependencies, they must be built with meson.

For example, to override libsoup and GStreamer, just clone both repositories below of Tools/flatpak/local-projects/subprojects, and declare them in WEBKIT_LOCAL_DEPS environment variable:

export WEBKIT_SDK_LOCAL_DEPS=libsoup,gstreamer-full
export WEBKIT_SDK_LOCAL_DEPS_OPTIONS="-Dgstreamer-full:introspection=disabled -Dgst-plugins-good:soup=disabled"
build-webkit --wpe