Helping with Maintenance of Packages in Debian

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On Mar 28, 2012, at 1:09 PM, Andres Mejia wrote:

> On Mar 28, 2012 2:14 AM, "Christian Marillat" <marillat at free.fr> wrote:
> >
> > Andres Mejia <amejia004 at gmail.com> writes:
> >
> > > Hi Christian,
> > > So I'll ask one more time and if the answer is no (or you don't
> > > respond), I won't bother you anymore. For the packages in DMO that can
> > > now be uploaded to Debian, will you be willing to help upload and
> > > maintain those packages in Debian?
> >
> > I can upload ffmpeg in Debian ?
> >
> > Christian
> >
> 
> Uploading ffmpeg would be a bad idea. Aside from the package name conflicts, libav and ffmpeg are incompatible with each other. Trying to keep them abi/api compatible would be a lot of work, more than what I have time for at least. If you want to upload ffmpeg and still have them compatible, feel free to submit your patches to libav/ffmpeg. Another alternative is to have the libraries renamed, of which case you will still need to submit patches upstream
> 


Since this whole ffmpeg-libav thing is a sensitive issue, I think we need to treat lightly, and be extra clear. I strongly disagree that uploading ffmpeg into Debian is a bad idea.   It may be difficult to handle both ffmpeg and libav, but that is a separate question.  ffmpeg provides many things that libav does not.  For example, I have written an audio redaction plugin for ffmpeg.  Such a plugin is not possible in libav.

When I read statements like "Uploading ffmpeg would be a bad idea", it seems to me that the Debian-multimedia team has taken sides on the ffmpeg-libav fork dispute.  That is not a position that a Debian team should take. Both ffmpeg and libav remain valuable free software that people want to use.  And if someone is willing to do the work, Debian and Debian Multimedia should welcome both ffmpeg and libav.

.hc

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