On Wednesday 04 February 2015 09:49:02 Ian Stakenvicius wrote: > In other words, we didn't actually have a default, we just had a means > that portage would choose one of them if the end-user haddn't chosen > already. > > This to me is still the ideal solution (not the || deps due to the > issues they have, but the soft default) -- why is it that we need to > actually choose or force a default implementation in the profiles anyhow?? Because it was causing obscure blocks when trying to build/update sufficiently complex system (e.g. pulling in mplayer and vlc simultaneously). I hit this a few times recently while rebuilding a few systems, which caused me to go and search for "wtf all this mess is about?" and finding exactly that link with explanation that was already cited in this thread (by developer of some viewer named similarly to vlc - vmp??).
On the technical side: setting -libav +ffmpeg explicitly seemed to work the best. I had an impression that the other way around was not as robust - I tried to enforce libav, but that was before reading on this issue, so I don't remember what was the state of ffmpeg. I just remember having to look at the emerge --tree -pv output to figure out that these two flags were in conflict.. George
