FFmpeg release branch, was: Bug#540729: ffmpeg: Possible regression - fails to decode AAC

[Fabian Greffrath]

Diego Biurrun schrieb:
> I talked to Jörg Jaspert at LinuxTag and he told me that he put some
> lawyers that work pro bono for Debian on the issue (SFLC among them).
> The end result may well be that the decoders need to be taken out along
> with the encoders, not that the encoders are allowed to be put in.

This would indeed be the worst case scenario!

> Maybe you should then just drop your work on Debian and concentrate on
> something else instead.  If Debian decides that it does not want to (or
> cannot) provide multimedia infrastructure, your work on trying to
> provide multimedia infrastructure is wasted...

It hurts to read such sentence (I know that having an emotional tie to 
a computer operating system sounds irrational, but anyway...). I don't 
think that Debian (i.e. the people that decide about the contents of 
the software archive) do not *want* to provide multimedia 
infrastructure, remember "The universal OS". But I could understand 
their acting if lawyers recommended to remove certain software, simply 
because it may endanger those people who rely on Debian as being 100% 
"safe".

> That's what I've been saying all along.  Debian risks sliding into
> uselessness and obscurity.

Fedora has already gone that way and I believe their distro is far 
from useless. They managed however to build a community (rpmfusion) 
that provides high-quality packages for users who feel they want to 
use Fedora but rely on packages that Fedora cannot ship. I think 
something like this is always worth the effort.

Fabian

-- 
Dipl.-Phys. Fabian Greffrath

Ruhr-Universität Bochum
Lehrstuhl für Energieanlagen und Energieprozesstechnik (LEAT)
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