Cannot install Advene on Debian

[cinematicity]

Using a fresh installation of Debian 5.0.7 on a PC, I am unable to install advene.

I followed the instructions on the advene download page, but they do not work. I get the following errors:

Code: Select all

# apt-get install advene
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
advene: Depends: python-central (>= 0.6.11) but 0.6.8 is to be installed
Recommends: vlc-plugin-svg but it is not going to be installed
Recommends: python-vlc but it is not going to be installed
Recommends: shotdetect but it is not going to be installed
Recommends: python-webkit but it is not installable
E: Broken packages

These errors do not make any sense to me.

Could somebody advise me on the exact commands needed to install advene?

Thanks!

[oaubert]

Hello

Sorry about this dependency issue. The message indicates that the advene package requires python-central (a helper program that helps to package python applications in debian) with a newer version than what is available in current Debian stable (5.0.7). Advene is developed on a Debian testing distribution, and the package generation requires minimal version for some packages. In the future, I will try to test/generate packages from a stable distribution to make sure that this does not occur. However, with a new Debian stable release approaching (6.0/testing is in "deep freeze" and should be released shortly), I do not think it would be worth to take the time to do it right now.

Here are some options that could fix the situation in the meantime:
- upgrade/install to the will-be-next-stable Debian release (currently Debian squeezy/testing, soon to be released as 6.0).
- run Advene from its sources (download sources, and run bin/advene). It may require installing dependencies by yourself though, if some are missing.
- force install by downloading the package and running "dpkg -i --force-depends advene_0.44_all.deb"
- try to install http://www.advene.org/download/li ... lenny1.deb which I regenerated quickly by lowering the python-support version requirement. This is a hack though, I cannot guarantee it will work.

The first option is preferable in my opinion, since you would also have recent versions of components (gtk, gstreamer...) with bugs fixed.
Let me know if any of these options works for you, or if you need additional support.

Regards,
Olivier

[cinematicity]

Olivier,

Thanks very much for your speedy message.

On your suggestion, I followed the first option that you proposed: upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze.

I did this by running the following:

Code: Select all

#su
#aptitude update
#aptitude install apt dpkg aptitude
#aptitude full-upgrade

I mention this because the last line did not succeed -- some things could not be found -- so I ran it twice. The second time, there were no errors given at the end. I don't know if this is correct or not.

Then, I tried apt-get install advene again. This time, it installed a whole bunch of extra packages, and it seemed to work. No errors, at least.

When I tried advene from the command line, I got a dialog box to set up some default directories. I just clicked OK for the defaults and it crashed with the error:

Code: Select all

librdf warning - Model does not support contexts
librdf warning - Model does not support contexts
librdf warning - Model does not support contexts


Now, when I try to run advene, it just says:

Code: Select all

Advene output is stored into  /root/.advene/advene.log

And then exits. I looked in the log file and there I see:

Code: Select all

OSError: librsvg-2.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

At this point, I am stuck. Am I doing something wrong? What would you suggest?

Question: is advene really supported on Debian? It doesn't seem like it should be this complicated to install an application. I just want to use advene, but for that it seems I also need to understand how to upgrade a Linux kernel, answering questions about the GRUB loader, firmware, volume labels, and a half-dozen other obscure prompts that appear during the upgrade process.

Finally, can I ask, who is the audience for advene? That is, do you want a general audience of film and media scholars to use advene, including independent researchers, or is advene intended only for a very small group working in elite universities and research centers, where there is a technical support staff?

If you are interested in a non-elite audience, may I suggest that you may it a top priority to improve your documentation and new-user experience? Right now, the documentation for Debian, at least, is not adequate. Needless to say, cool features and functionality do not matter much if it's not possible to use them. If I have this much trouble making advene work, I can hardly recommend it to my colleagues, right?

Thanks,

M

[oaubert]

Hello

I am not quite sure that you really upgraded to Squeeze, since you do not mention any changes in your /etc/apt/sources.list file. You should have added a line like

Code: Select all

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ testing main contrib non-free

Anyway, since you managed to apt-get install advene, you should have the necessary packages.

Concerning your error, it looks like I forgot to add a dependency to librsvg2-2 (moreover, the application should work without it, so there is a bug). Please "apt-get install librsvg2-2", it should fix this issue. This missing dependency was never reported since this package is very commonly used, and I do not think that anybody tried to install Advene on a fresh Debian install before. Thanks for your feedback.

About the Debian support: yes, Advene is supported on Debian. It is indeed developped on Debian. However, it is hard to keep the requirements in line with Debian stable, where packages updates can have some significant lag. This is especially true in the realm of multimedia applications (gstreamer for instance), where there is much activity and many bugs are fixed. So the baseline is: For linux, it is advised to install on a Debian/testing (or unstable) distribution, or the latest Ubuntu. I will put that more prominently on the website.

The intended audience is indeed a general audience of non-computer savvy users. That is why we go through great pain to produce MacOSX and Windows binary installers, which are easily installable. Please keep in mind that this is a free software project, with a very little team (between 2 and 4 people) working on it. We fix things as they are reported to us, so keep reporting issues, we welcome them and they will be taken into account. If you want to contribute further, you can even register on the public wiki http://www.advene.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page and write some user documentation. Basically, user documentation written by developers is most of the time useless and incomprehensible: the best user documentation is written by users (which we also are, but with a great bias).

We try to compensate the lack of documentation by a good reactivity on questions on this forum, so do not hesitate to ask for further explanations or post more remarks.

Regards,
Olivier

[cinematicity]

Thanks for your very detailed reply.

Actually, I did modify /etc/apt/sources.list before upgrading to squeeze. Sorry, I forgot to mention that.

If I execute uname -a , I get 2.6.32-5-686 . That's squeeze, I gather.

So, I tried apt-get install librsvg2-2 as you suggested, but it seems already installed. I get:

Code: Select all

librsvg2-2 is already the newest version.
librsvg2-2 set to manually installed.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

I try advene again, it doesn't work, and I still see this in the log file:

Code: Select all

OSError: librsvg-2.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

What should I try now?

[oaubert]

I just checked more precisely: librsvg-2.so is part of librsvg2-dev, while the librsvg2 package installs a versioned librsvg-2.so.2. Just install librsvg2-dev.

What I do not understand is that I explicitly coded to fallback on librsvg-2.so.2 if librsvg-2.so cannot be found. I will have to investigate this. Thanks for the detailed reports.

[oaubert]

Indeed, the bug has been fixed last november, but in the development tree and not in the some-months-old 0.44 release. Alternatively to installing libsrvg2-dev, you can try to install an package of the development version from http://www.advene.org/download/linux/20101210/
This snapshot package is close to the what the next release of Advene will be, but we are sorting out bugs specific to the MacOSX and windows versions before doing the actual release.

[cinematicity]

I tried the development version and it seems to work -- thanks!

I'm trying to analyze a movie now. I can't tell if it's doing that or not, but I'll create a new thread if there's really a problem.

Thanks again.