Providing non-stripped ffmpeg libraries

[Fabian Greffrath]

Andres Mejia schrieb:
> Well if that's the case, then we should just upload. Eventually, we should get 
> some response, right?

I suggest the following procedure:

As has been stated repeatedly, we do not remove any encoding code out 
of the "stripped" ffmpeg source code -- we are only removing 
references to this code so that it won't be accessible by the 
libraries. I think the same -- or at least something very comparable 
to this -- happens if we explicitely disable the specific codecs in 
the configure call. May be the libraries will be even the same 
bytewise. If this is true, we don't win anything from stripping the 
sources. We just make it harder for our users to rebuild unstripped 
libraries on their own computers, which is outside the scope of the 
Debian project anyway.

For this reason I suggest we use an *unstripped upstream source* for 
the next upload to Debian and explicitely disable the affected codecs 
in the configure call (which is what already done now in 
debian/confflags anyway). This means that users who want unstripped 
private copies of the libraries will only have to "apt-get source" the 
Debian ffmpeg package, comment out a few lines in debian/confflags and 
rebuild the packages. For the official Debian packages the situation 
remains unchanged (i.e. improved, see above), since we still ship the 
encoders source code but still disable them and don't ship them in the 
binary packages.

Since we would not want to introduce this upload secretely and since 
we will not have to go through the NEW queue to get the attention of 
ftp-masters, we should drop them a line on the list or in the 
debian/README.Source file. I am still hesitating to forward this mail 
to the #522373 bug report before I have heard your opinion about this.

So what do you think?

Fabian


-- 
Dipl.-Phys. Fabian Greffrath

Ruhr-Universität Bochum
Lehrstuhl für Energieanlagen und Energieprozesstechnik (LEAT)
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D-44780 Bochum

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