Re: How Does One Build Libdvdcss?

["Jay F. Shachter" <jay%m5.chicago.il.us@localhost>]

Centuries ago, Nostradamus predicted that Greg Troxel would write on Sun Jan 7 08:10:48 2024:

> 
> "Jay F. Shachter" <jay%m5.chicago.il.us@localhost> writes:
> 
>>
>> How does one obtain libdvdcss on NetBSD?  If I am not mistaken, the
>> procedure involves:
>>
>>    cd /usr/pkgsrc/multimedia/libdvdcss
>>    make install clean
>>
>> But (also if I am not mistaken), one must first make some sort of
>> change in /etc/mk.conf before issuing the above commands.  What is the
>> procedure?  As always, thank you in advance for any and all replies.
>>
> 
> I'm not going to give you advice about this package.
> 
> General advice for your next similar situation:
> 
> 1) Instead of asking an open-ended question (that makes it seem like you
> have not tried to figure things out), try to do what you want to do, see
> what happens, try to resolve problems, and then if/when you are stuck,
> write and in addition to mentioning your goal, say what you did and what
> happened.  When you do, include the key lines from output; don't
> summarize them.
> 
> 2) When wondering about a package, read the files in the package
> directory.  I realize that if you haven't learned BSD make and pgksrc
> development the code is hard to read, but often it is possible to
> understand something anyway.  Sometimes people working on packages even
> include comments.  This might be one of those times, and it might not!
> 

Indeed, I did read the files in the package directory, and, in
particular, I read /usr/pkgsrc/multimedia/libdvdcss/Makefile.
The Makefile comments state that the first rule of the dvdcss club is
that you don't talk about the dvdcss club.  They also state, as I
indicated in the message to which you replied, that one must add a
line to /etc/mk.conf defining LIBDVD_MASTER_SITES, but, without
knowing how to define it, that information is not helpful.  Nor have I
found the information by consulting search engines.  In particular,
https://wiki.netbsd.org/tutorials/how_to_read_css_protected_dvds --
which a search engine had shown me, and which I had already read,
before I sent my initial message -- does not tell me what value to
give to LIBDVD_MASTER_SITES, only that I must define it.  As of this
writing, I have still not found, anywhere, a proper value for that
variable.

At the bottom of /usr/pkgsrc/multimedia/libdvdcss/Makefile one sees
that, as an alternative to the above, one can manually download
${DISTNAME}${EXTRACT_SUFX} into ${DISTDIR} (I thought that in
makefiles, variable names are to be surrounded by parentheses, not
curly braces; but I digress).  And at the very top of the file,
DISTNAME is defined to be libdvdcss-1.4.3 and EXTRACT_SUFX is defined
to be .tar.bz2, so with a little work I can put those together and
determine that I am to download libdvdcss-1.4.tar.bz2 into an unknown
directory -- because the makefile does not define DISTDIR.  So one
still does not know what to do.

What worked, in the end, was not reading the makefile, because the
makefile did not tell me all that I needed to know.  What worked was
throwing caution to the winds and running the "make" command before
knowing what I needed to know.  When I did that, I was magically shown
the value of DISTDIR.  At that point, it was a simple matter to find
out at https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/multimedia/libdvdcss.html
from where I can download libdvdcss-1.4.tar.bz2 and from there a "make
install clean" got me what I wanted (or, more precisely, it got me to
the next point at which I wanted something else).

So in the end, your advice was more helpful that an answer to my
question would have been, because it caused me to proceed without an
answer to my question, and in that way to become more self-sufficient
and not to rely on getting answers to my questions.  It is as the
proverb says, and it is a wise proverb, "If you build a man a fire, he
is warm for a day; but if you set a man on fire, he is warm for the
rest of his life".  No wait, I don't think that's how it goes.  But
it's something like that.

                        Jay F. Shachter
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