Corporate pressure

[Peter Backlund]

> What we want, is of course to have certain pieces of software such as 
> RealPlayer/HelixPlayer and Acrobat Reader are made available in a 
> sensibly packaged way, accesible via the standard software management 
> tools. 

I've talked to some of the Real Inc. developers on IRC, and they 
expressed their desire to see Helix Player included in the Fedora 
distribution! The player breaks down into 3 parts:

1. The main player and browser plugin. This is covered by the RPSL (Real 
Public Source License) and is OSS-approved. This part can be included in 
Fedora Core/Extras.

2. MP3 playback capabilities. This is freely redistributable as well, 
but will have to go into livna.org.

3. Real Audio/Video playback codecs. These are under a binary license 
agreement, and not freely redistributable. However, Real were interested 
  a setting up an arangement with Fedora in order to solve this. 
Inclusion into the livna repository looks like the best solution to me.

A few IRC quotes:

<_duncan> in general, we would like very much to have the helix player 
distributed with fedora
<_duncan> if anyone at fedora wants to talk to us, send them to myself 
or robla (duncanh at real.com, robla at real.com) and we'll be happy to engage 
with them

So, someone at Red Hat should contact robla at real.com (_duncan in #helix, 
irc.helixcommunity.org) for further investigation. Meanwhile, I'm going 
to start working on, and submit to QA, a specfile for the package.

There are no source tarballs yet, so the source has to be checked out 
from CVS, a cumbersome procedure tha involves ssh tunneling and an 
obscure build system written in Python :-). It won't build with the 
standard RPM_OPT_FLAGS (Real uses -march=pentium -mcpu=pentium) due to 
missing 386 code in a header:

http://www.educ.umu.se/~peter/atomicbase.h (starting at line 521)

(I hope I didn't break any law when putting that there...)

I have no idea how to fix this, but someone else might. Otherwise, the 
i386 arch package will have to excluded.

/Peter Backlund