Providing non-stripped ffmpeg libraries

Andres Mejia mcitadel at gmail.com
Fri May 29 08:27:18 UTC 2009


On Friday 29 May 2009 03:11:22 Fabian Greffrath wrote:
> 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.

Does anyone know what happens when an app requests a disabled codec? I don't 
know if upstream already took care of this case.

> 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.

I'm certain that FFmpeg devs would love to NOT have their source package 
modified.

We should set it up to where users don't have to edit anything, only enable some 
option in DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS like internalencoders.

> 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?

We definitely should try contacting ftp-masters, via bug #522373. Private 
messages to ftp-master doesn't help anyone researching this situation.

We could probably worry about how to distribute unstripped libraries and have 
apps use them later.

Regards,
Andres



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