After OpenCV, the other major dependency the mjmech software has, which is necessary to complete the raspberry pi 3b+ bazel build setup, was gstreamer. Unlike the previous dependencies, this one is a doozy — gstreamer has an enormous transitive dependency set. Additionally, we needed to use its ffmpeg wrappers, which brings in more dependencies.

In this post, I’ll just try to map out the dependencies that we ended up actually needing, so that they can be tackled one by one.

gstreamer core

The core gstreamer base, actually has a minimal dependency set, only really glib. glib in turn has a small dependency set, just libffi, pcre, and zlib.

gst-plugins-base

Most of the functionality within the gstreamer ecosystem is contained within “plugins”, i.e. modules of software which implement a constrained interface and can be installed into media pipelines. All plugins use the common routines defined within gst-plugins-base, and a few low level plugins are defined here. This begins the dependency explosion, as some of these base plugins start to call into non-trivial pieces of the free desktop graphical stack. Direct dependencies here include libx11, libxv, from x.org, and pango.

In turn those packages have a large fanout. libx11 and libxv depend upon videoproto, libxext, xorgproto, libxcb, libxau, libxdcmp, xtrans, and xcb-proto. pango depends upon freetype, harfbuzz, fribidi, cairo, bzip2, freetype, pixman, fontconfig, util-linux, and expat.

gst-plugins-good and gst-plugins-bad

mjmech doesn’t rely on any of the plugins in gst-plugins-good, so nothing was necessary there! We do use some from gst-plugins-bad, but those have no additional dependencies.

gst-plugins-ugly

Here, mjmech uses the x264 plugin, which in turn depends on the x264 external library.

gst-libav

These are the plugins which wrap ffmpeg (nee libav, nee ffmpeg). ffmpeg in turn depends additional on nasm to assemble for x86.

Next steps

Now that we’ve enumerated all the dependent packages, we can start to work on packaging them. First up are those necessary for gstreamer core, so libffi, pcre, and zlib.