[FFmpeg-devel] Reintroducing FFmpeg to Debian

[Jonas Smedegaard]

Quoting Matthias Urlichs (2014-08-08 21:22:38)
> Alessio Treglia:
>> We've spent a lot of time over the past months talking to upstreams, 
>> forwarding them our patches and make sure their programs and 
>> libraries work with libav.
>> We've spent ***months*** in making the whole thing work, and dropping 
>> libav in favour of FFmpeg at this point, roughly few weeks from the 
>> freeze deadline, would be definitely insane.
>>
> Yes, that work might be "wasted". But I don't think that it's a good 
> idea to base the decision of whether or not X is better for Debian on 
> the fact that somebody did a lot of work for Y instead.
>
> Yes, the freeze is not that far away. But frankly, how much effort 
> would it be to switch now? As far as I can tell from this discussion, 
> the answer is "not a whole lot". The bulk of ffmpeg/libav's reverse 
> dependencies is just a simple binNMU away, and as the libraries seem 
> to be co-installable we don't even need a big transition.
>
> We'd also benefit from the fact that Upstream tends to use FFmpeg. I'd 
> hate to report some intractable codec bug which Upstream closes with 
> an "it works with FFmpeg" comment -- what would you recommend me to do 
> in that situation, next year -- install the ffmpeg libs from 
> Experimental and rebuild the offender?

I would recommend you to take into account who is actually going to 
maintain this in Debian.  Perhaps those who've maintained libav in the 
past will loose interest if switching to FFmpeg (or that it will attract 
others who are far better at it or maintenance becomes much easier, but 
I doubt that).

Just please distinguish between those in this thread telling what they 
do themselves and those (bogusly!) dictating others to do stuff.


 - Jonas

-- 
 * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
 * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

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