Package dependencies for ffmpeg and tone

[lkiesow]

Right now, the Audiobookshelf Debian package downloads some software binaries during package installation and write those to /usr/lib/audiobookshelf-ffmpeg/ (not only FFmpeg end up in there):

# ll /usr/lib/audiobookshelf-ffmpeg/
total 179972
drwxr-xr-x  4 audiobookshelf audiobookshelf     4096 Jan 21 15:29 ./
drwxr-xr-x 50 root           root               4096 Jan 21 15:29 ../
-rw-r--r--  1           1000           1000    35147 Sep 10 13:25 GPLv3.txt
-rwxr-xr-x  1           1000           1000 78502816 Sep 10 13:25 ffmpeg*
-rwxr-xr-x  1           1000           1000 78392768 Sep 10 13:25 ffprobe*
drwxr-xr-x  2           1000           1000     4096 Sep 10 13:25 manpages/
drwxr-xr-x  7           1000           1000     4096 Sep 10 12:48 model/
-rwxr-xr-x  1           1000           1000   690888 Sep 10 13:25 qt-faststart*
-rw-r--r--  1           1000           1000     2276 Sep 10 13:25 readme.txt
-rwxr-xr-x  1           1001            121 26639855 Nov  4 23:33 tone*

Instead of downloading them and writing them to the file system usually managed by packages, the Audiobookshelf Debian package should just define dependencies to tone and FFmpeg packages.

[advplyr]

I'm not sure what you mean. Are you saying to require the end-user to install these dependencies on their own?

[lkiesow]

Define them as dependency of the audiobookshelf package. Installing the package will then install the dependencies automatically given that they exist in any of the available repositories. If in doubt, you can also provide a package for the dependencies in this repository.

The advantage of that is that you don't end up with rough binaries somewhere is your file system, that you don't need to redownload/install these tools every time you install/update audiobookshelf and that you can even update those separately.

See Declaring relationships between packages

To see what I mean, here is what the installation of the Audiobookshelf RPM looks like. Installing audiobookshelf will automatically install ffmpeg and tone as dependencies: