Helping with Maintenance of Packages in Debian

[Fabian Greffrath]

Am 26.04.2012 18:18, schrieb Hans-Christoph Steiner:
> 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.

I disagree and second Andres' statement that uploading ffmpeg into 
Debian *now* in its current state is a bad idea. This is not because 
ffmpeg is bad per se - it isn't - it's just that we decided to go the 
libav route. This switch is not irrevocable, but so far no general 
problems have occured with libav and I think it fits better to 
Debian's release model. There is simply no pressing reason to switch back.

Furthermore, currently libav and ffmpeg share the same library name 
space without being binary compatible - they are just not drop-in 
replacements for each other. This is also the reason for most of the 
bug reports we receive from users, who mixed up Debian packages built 
against libav with ffmpeg libraries from d-m.o.

If we would re-introduce ffmpeg into Debian now, alongside libav, we'd 
have two choices. Either we get ffmpeg and libav binary-compatible and 
sustain this compatibility for all subsequent releases. Or we can live 
with the incompatibility, but then we sould have to rename the 
libraries of one of the projects and have to build each and every 
depending package twice, once against libav and once against ffmpeg - 
with appropriate package dependency declarations and migration plans.

Do you think any of these alternatives is worth the effort? I don't!

  - Fabian