Bug#653887: libavformat53 breaks mplayer

[Reinhard Tartler]

On So, Jan 01, 2012 at 17:04:14 (CET), Reimar Döffinger wrote:

> On 1 Jan 2012, at 15:26, Reinhard Tartler <siretart at tauware.de> wrote:
>> On So, Jan 01, 2012 at 15:08:03 (CET), Julien Cristau wrote:
>> 
>>> On Sun, Jan  1, 2012 at 08:25:00 +0100, Reinhard Tartler wrote:
>>> 
>>>> I really think this is a bug in mplayer. ff_codec_wav_tags is and always
>>>> was an internal symbol, that is no longer exported since this commit:
>>>> 
>>>> http://git.libav.org/?p=libav.git;a=commitdiff;h=8d74bf17c6d6280195854f4dadb19ef37d054566
>>>> 
>>>> This issue a long-standing wart in mplayer that should really be fixed
>>>> there.
>>>> 
>>> Honestly, this is kind of a broken position IMO.  The moment one of your
>>> reverse deps uses a symbol, it stops being internal, whatever your
>>> intentions were.
>> 
>> Well, if you can show me that a number of other packages use
>> ff_codec_wav_tags, I agree to patch the symbol versioning script to make
>> it visible again. But TBH, I'd be surprised if you would find a single
>> other package.
>
> Please note that this is fixed since several months (actually I think
> since very shortly after this became an issue) in MPlayer svn.

Interesting, I wasn't aware of that; thanks for the notice.

> So you could update, backport the patch (well, unfortunately several
> since the first few tries were broken) or make the versioning script
> change as a temporary workaround you would _not_ have to carry around
> forever.

Well, of course backporting that patch would be an option, but TBH, I
don't really think it's worth the effort and we should update the
mplayer package anyways.

However, I feel very uneasy with updating packages to random snapshot
versions for distro releases¹.  I personally, and it seems nobody from
team pkg-multimedia either, has the ressources to continously check what
important changes may or may not be useful for debian, so I really
prefer sticking with release tarballs.  Unfortunately, there was no
release that matched Libav 0.7, so I bit the bullet and uploaded a snapshot
that was up-to-date when Libav 0.7 was released to Debian (which was
then synced to Ubuntu).

Maybe you're right and we now need again to update to a current snapshot
version. But as stated before, I feel very uneasy with that and would
prefer a proper release tarball, which is then shared other distros.

Happy new year,
Reinhard

1: For Ubuntu PPAs, that's a totally different story, as they are
'opt-in' and not available by default. You might remember that I build
daily mplayer packages via cron at
https://launchpad.net/~motumedia/+archive/mplayer-daily/+packages, but
as these use a static libav copy instead of the system libav, we cannot
use these packages directly.

-- 
Gruesse/greetings,
Reinhard Tartler, KeyID 945348A4