Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Day: December 29, 2021

Repository purge coming up soon-ish

December 29, 2021 / / 3 Comments

After I built a fresh Avidemux (see previous post) I realized how many old packages I still have in my repositories. They are taking up space on many server mirrors.

I have decided that I will start a cleansing process, a purge if you want, of all the older stuff. The reason is not just disk space of course. It’s my realization that there may be vulnerabilities in these old packages that I never addressed; and I really hope that people have migrated their machines to Slackware 14.2 (servers or conservative desktop users) or went with -current (modern desktop users, let’s call those).

From time to time, you need to clean house. I myself am infamous for not throwing away anything… just take a look at my attic. So these packages will be gone from online servers, but live on in my own local package archive.

Because of the time involved (manual checks to ensure that I don’t remove too much by mistake) this will be done in several ‘waves’. My repositories already don’t have packages for Slackware releases older than 13.37 and tomorrow I will purge all packages targeting Slackware 13.37. Later, that will be followed by a purge of all packages for Slackware 14.0, and finally those that were meant for Slackware 14.1 will also be removed. I will stick with package support for Slackware 14.2 (and 15.0 when that gets released) and always -current.

In case you still run one of these older versions of Slackware, you would want to make local copies of the following repositories ASAP:

And also these:

I will leave the multilib repositories (http://www.slackware.com/~alien/multilib/ and its mirrors) untouched.

Eric

I finally updated my avidemux package

December 29, 2021 / / 13 Comments

I have an avidemux package in my (restricted) repository.
But… it had not been refreshed since Slackware 14.0 (8 years old now) and its binaries stopped working on Slackware long ago. Looking back at the packaging work I did today, I guess the thing that kept me from updating that Avidemux package was the numerous dependencies that also needed an update (they all were stuck at an old Slackware 14.0 release).

In the midst of a full week of holidays and waiting for my rye/honey sourdough bread dough to ferment, I had plenty time to devote to the creation of a fresh package for  Avidemux 2.8.0. This was recently released; yesterday actually!
And not just avidemux needed some work on its SlackBuild script; I needed to update ageing scripts for aften, faac, faad2, libdca, libfdk-aac, opencore-amr, x264 and xvidcore, and added a x265 package before I could compile avidemux with full support for codecs and plugins.

Based on the imminent (fingers crossed) release of Slackware 15.0 according to Patrick himself, I decided to create these packages only for Slackware-current (soon to become 15.0). I also cleaned out ancient versions of all these packages. They are now removed for Slackware 14.1 and older.
Note that faac and libfdk-aac just like avidemux contain patent-encumbered software (the AAC encoder) and due to that circumstance  the three packages are banished to my ‘restricted repository‘ which is hosted outside the US of A so that the patent trolls won’t bother Pat.

Let me cue you in about Avidemux in case you are not familiar with the program.
It’s a video editor supporting many video formats thanks to the built-in ffmpeg libraries and many plugins. It allows for a decent level of automation through tasks and scripts, and it has a command-line interface next to its Qt5-based graphical user interface.

Some of the 2.8.0 release highlights: Avidemux is now able to convert HDR video to SDR with tone mapping using a variety of methods. The FFV1 encoder has been added again. TrueHD audio tracks can be decoded and are supported for Matroska containers. The internal ffmpeg libraries are the latest 4.4.1 version. It integrates better with pulseaudio in terms of volume adjustments.

In case you are interested in some comparisons between the functionality of Avidemux and its competitors, here are some pointers. In terms of video conversion capability it compares to Handbrake (also in my repository), see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_video_converters. When you look at its video cutting and edting qualities on the other hand, Avidemux is better compared with Kdenlive which is included in Slackware as part of KDE Plasma5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_video_editing_software

FYI… my sourdough bread is out of the oven, and it’s smelling great!

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