[FFmpeg-devel] Proposal: Homebrew tap for FFmpeg

[Lou Logan]

On Fri, Feb 8, 2019, at 12:03 AM, Jean-Baptiste Kempf wrote:
>
> Helping people to build non-free distributions of FFmpeg is a very weird 
> and dubious goal.
> This is just helping other people violate the FFmpeg license.

You could say the same thing for other build scripts such as the AUR for Arch Linux. It's just a tool. Tools can be misused.

You could apply the same argument to our source code. Having --enable-nonfree in the source code helpspeople violate the license. But that's a completely different discussion.

I'm not saying it doesn't happen, and I haven't actively searched for it, but I don't personally recall any evidence of any homebrew users violating the license.

> Do not use Github to develop. Github is not-free.

I believe there are three reasons for the Github suggestion.

1. It makes the homebrew command trivially shorter/simpler for the user:
https://docs.brew.sh/How-to-Create-and-Maintain-a-Tap

2. More importantly, a question for those who volunteered (and potentially future contributors), would you be less inclined to maintain via a normal, non-Github git repo? Would the typical homebrew user know where to report issues? Where would they report issues? It's unfortunate that Github is not free, but we need to take account of the differences between communities and experience.

3. Someone is going to make this ffmpeg "formulae" (as they call it) which will become the most popular one among users. I bet it's most certainly going to be on Github. I think it's better that we have some ability to be able to edit it.