Hey, the MKVToolNix author here. First of all I appreciate all the effort of packaging MKVToolNix for Arch. Thanks for that. The orignal PKGBUILD in the repositories builds the whole of MKVToolNix twice, once configured with GUI support, once configured without it. However, this is not really necessary. Being configured with and without GUI support only affects two programs: mkvinfo and mkvtoolnix-gui. If configured with GUI support then mkvinfo will be built including a Qt-based GUI in addition to the always-included text mode interface, and mkvtoolnix-gui will be built in the first place. If configured without GUI support then mkvinfo will only include that text mode interface and mkvtoolnix-gui will not be built at all. Therefore the PKGBUILD in the pastebin cuts down on compilation time by only compiling the whole of MKVToolNix once when it's configured with GUI support. For the text-mode only version of mkvinfo you only have to configure MKVToolNix and build mkvinfo (and then preserve that binary over the »drake clean«, of course); nothing else has to be built. Hence the pastebin'ed PKGBUILD being a lot faster. There's only one version of mkvinfo's man page in my upstream MKVToolNix source, and the installed version is identical in both cases (configured with/without GUI). Therefore including it in each Arch package is indeed wasting space. The mkvtoolnix-gui (and therefore the Arch mkvtoolnix-qt package) cannot work without the mkvmerge executable as the GUI uses the CLI-only mkvmerge for all of its actual work. Therefore the mkvtoolnix-qt package must depend on the mkvtoolnix package, and preferably of the same version: I only guarantee that mkvtoolnix-gui version a.b.c will work with mkvmerge version a.b.c, nothing else. The GUI will even emit warnings if the mkvmerge executable's version differs. Therefore upgrading the mkvtoolnix-qt package without upgrading the mkvtoolnix package should ideally not be possible. If you don't want to include mkvinfo's Qt GUI then you still have to do both builds. Well, you could leave out mkvinfo during the with-GUI- configured build, but that wouldn't cut down on compilation time a lot as mkvinfo only consists of three source files on top of the common library. I don't particularly care whether or not mkvinfo's GUI is included in the mkvtoolnix-qt package. I've created it mostly for Windows users as those are pretty resilient to the advice of using the command line version ;) On the other hand I can really understand them when I think of cmd.exe… Kind regards, mosu
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