I needed to do some Teletext testing yesterday for a customer, and since I was going to be doing it remotely over SSH, I figured I would build xawtv locally in their environment, since it included a tool called “mtt” which had both an X11 version and a console version. My assumption was that I would download the source, run ./configure (which would not see X11 so it would only build the command-line version of mtt), and everything would be swell.
Wow, what a pain. Bear in mind, this is on a *stock* Fedora 11 system.
It took me nearly two hours to get it to compile successfully, including the need to make source code changes to work with recent versions of gcc. Also, the autoconf rules were really crappy, so if I was missing development headers, the ./configure would succeed but then I would get nasty errors at compile time about missing #include files.
To make matters worse, despite the fact that I only needed the command line version of the mtt tool, I still had to satisfy all the X11 dependencies, since the application won’t compile without them.
I guess the reason I’m asking is because I wonder if anyone else out there actually cares about being able to compile xawtv on modern distributions. From a development standpoint, it appears to have clearly been abandoned, but I suspect there are *some* users out there who still rely on it. I’m tempted to import the current code into the KernelLabs hg repository, and check-in all the patches so that it builds easily, but it’s probably not worth the effort if nobody cares about it.
Similar to what I’ve done with tvtime, it might be nice for users and Linux distributions to have a single repository which is kept up-to-date with the latest fixes to build under current distributions (and includes a merged version of all the patches from the various Linux distributions).
So, now is the time to chime in that this is something that you think would be useful (by replying in the comments section below).
I still rely on xawtv as a kind of bare minimum baseline to check if my tv card is working. That is, if it works at least with xawtv the hardware is sane and the OS is able to handle it at the basic level. Do you recommend other end user level tools for that?
It could be useful to understand, in light of what you say, how the build that is included in for example, Ubuntu, is done. I’ve always assumed that those packages had active maintainers and that each iteration of the distro is buil, or can be built, from the package source version.
Hi Alfonso,
In terms of the ability to do simple testing of cards, my hope is that tvtime will fill that need once I have finished making the changes described in the previous posts.
Generally speaking, both tvtime and xawtv are completely dead in terms of upstream development. In order for the distributions to use the code, they each maintain their own set of patches, and keep them up-to-date as their distro changes. This is inefficient as it creates more work for the distributions, is in fact duplicated work, and you could have a different experience with the application based on which distro you happened to use. You’re also restricted to only using the app on distros that packaged it for you, and sometimes it is not even hosted by the distribution but rather in third-party repositories.
Devin
Personally, I don’t use xawtv, but it’s likely widely available for use on other *nix operating systems as well as Linux. Furthermore, you’ve already finished the preliminary work so why not continue to update it as necessary? If the time maintaining xawtv can be minimized, then why not update it as required? So, I’d say import it, because someone out there likely uses it.