I would say the problem is he is trying to install them manually. Through plain "rpm -i/U" or double click on it.
Lets see the problem:
- Someone says XEyedBear that to watch wmv he needs the xine packages "from Packman".
- A "packman suse" search on Google guides him to PackMan :: home
- Depending on his language he will receive more or less information
- In german he will receive the full info, saying him that he can add the repo and install from YaST. Not in the best orther, but if he reads everything all will be ok.
- In english he will receive "Contribute" information, nothing about how to install it
- In spanish he will see that he can install manually or add an "installation source" (repo). But no word about how to do so, not even a link to the mirrors.
- In catalan he will receive the same info than in english: nothing.
- With this situation he probably will download the RPM and try to install them with a double click from Nautilus/Dolphin.
- The double click calls "yast2 --install". That, indeed, is far from perfect (sw_single module also has its problems...) and he will receive an error message saying him he can't install one without the other... without options to change vendor or anything similar, just an "I can't install it".
- Now he writes a message in this forum where, as 99% of users do, he gives a far from detailed description: no copy & paste of the exact errors and no explicit description about how he tried to install the package.
The imprecise explanation of the problem is an error from XEyedBear... that everybody does, you can't blame him without blaming half the world.
Everything else is an error from openSUSE.
First, the solution to XEyedBear: add Packman as an installation source as is explained at
Add Package Repositories to YaST - openSUSE using one of the mirrors from
Additional YaST Package Repositories - openSUSE
For everybody else. What I would like from this is:
- People writing in the Packman mailing list offering to translate the missing info to its language... specially english!!!
- People with a Factory installation testing this and opening a bug report if the behavior from "yast2 --install" continues. Note that one can use "rpm -i A.rpm B.rpm" to solve this kind of problem, but "yast2 -i A.rpm B.rpm" just tries to install them one after the other... returning two errors instead of one.
- People reporting to Packman that libxine1 should "recommend" libxine1-codecs instead of "requiring" it.
Normally I would have done all this myself... but this time I will not, just to see what happens.
I don't think this is the first time someone has the same problem than XEyedBear. It's sad than once people gets an alternative method, that works, to do something they forget about the problem and continue happily. Guys, once you step in a problem like this you should report it in bugzilla!! Whatever you find an aternative way to do what you want or not!!!