FFmpeg and libav

[Romain Bouqueau]

Dear Debian maintainers,

I'm a contributor on the GPAC multimedia project. I'm writing to you
because we spend more and more time trying to keep our project compatible
with both FFmpeg and libav. This is not sustainable.

We would need you to provide both FFmpeg and libav as separate packages in
Debian. However the libraries/headers in the packages have the same names.
AFAIU this makes our request impossible to fulfill.

What I see is: most of the work seems to be done at the libav side. However
FFmpeg works better: it is more stable, the maintainers are more reactive,
the APIs are more stable and consistent.

This fork causes duplicated work (VLC, MPlayer, GStreamer, GPAC). I think
it would be a good idea not to involve project contributors in this ego war
and let them choose whichever is best for their projects.

Note that it was not an issue until the last year because they were still
fairly compatible. The Debian package maintainers also seem to have kept
this issue away by installing old libav versions. As projects evolve, we
need new features from FFmpeg/libav. Thus keeping an old libav is not
sustainable either.

Does anyone has an idea to improve the situation?

Keep up with the good work,

Romain
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-multimedia-maintainers/attachments/20130925/26ad0dba/attachment.html>