GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 743336
codec installation exits if just a single package of the set is already installed
Last modified: 2015-05-28 08:03:51 UTC
This was discovered with the help of a local Fedora ambassador, who pointed to people complaining that can't play videos on Fedora, even though they have rpmfusion enabled. Here's what I've found out: I have a default installation of Fedora 21 (no rpmfusion), and I try to play this movie: https://download.blender.org/durian/trailer/sintel_trailer-480p.mp4 Totem says some codecs are missing and it wants to install 4 gstreamer packages. However, 2 of them are already installed. If I confirm "Install", it says: Failed to install software The package that is trying to be installed is already installed. But the additional 2 packages were not installed. It seem that PK refused the whole operation just because *some* of those packages were already installed. See "default - missing some packages.webm". Quite interestingly, it behaves exactly the same when I installed all of those 4 packages manually (using yum). It still wants to install those 4 packages, and it again ends with the same message. This time, it is right, but I would expect that it realizes this sooner, before actually asking me to install those 4 packages. There's no point in asking to install them when they are already installed, right? See "default - all packages installed.webm". As expected, Fedora is not able to play the movie even with all the packages installed, because there's no h264 codec available. So I added the rpmfusion repository and tried the same approach. Totem wanted to install more codecs, but PK exited again prematurely, because some existing packages were already installed. See "rpmfusion - missing some packages.webm". The last case is particularly inconvenient, because it precludes graphical users from making videos work in Fedora. They need yum in order to do that. PackageKit-1.0.4-1.fc21.x86_64 gnome-shell-3.14.3-1.fc21.x86_64 totem-3.14.1-1.fc21.x86_64 gnome-packagekit-3.14.2-1.fc21.x86_64
Created attachment 295156 [details] default - missing some packages
Created attachment 295157 [details] default - all packages installed
Created attachment 295158 [details] rpmfusion - missing some packages
Just a note, after all of this, if I install gstreamer1-libav (one of those packages totem wants to install, but fails to do so), the movie plays just fine.
I can confirm it behaves the same on my computer. (Fedora 21)
CCing Bastien for some Totem-related advice.
(In reply to comment #0) <snip> > Totem says some codecs are missing and it wants to install 4 gstreamer > packages. However, 2 of them are already installed. Totem doesn't choose which packages to install, it just passes the "requires" to the gstreamer helper. You can see what's requested on the command-line when reproducing the problem.
This is https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1168963 and I think it broke sometime between F19 and F20 (when we still used the yum backend!).
This problem is resolved with Fedora 22 and GNOME 3.16. gnome-software now handles codec installation and it works as expected. I'm not sure if I should close it or leave it open against gnome-packagekit. Reopen if needed.