Select provider of libav* libraries

Bálint Réczey balint at balintreczey.hu
Wed Aug 27 09:44:39 UTC 2014


Hi Matteo,

2014-08-27 11:11 GMT+02:00 Matteo F. Vescovi <mfvescovi at gmail.com>:
> Hi!
>
> On 2014-08-27 at 10:54 (CEST), Bálint Réczey wrote:
>> If the definition of being crazy is something close to being
>> irrational then making decisions based only on sunken costs can hardly
>> be shown to be the opposite. :-)
>>
>> OTOH it is very human. :-)
>
> Don't get me wrong: it's clear that if the effort would bring to
> something relevant, I'd be the first to say "hey, ok... let's do it
> now!" but, at the present time, I don't see any relevant benefit from
> the switch, at least on my side (that is limited to a couple of
> packages, by the way).
It is a perfectly fine reasoning. I just wanted to point out that many people
(not just you and I did not want to be personal) consider the time spent in
the past instead of the time to be spent in the future in the decision which
is not the best approach.
I myself don't _want_ Debian to switch and especially not _now_, but would
like to ask everyone to consider the future gains/costs related to
maintaining Libav/FFmpeg instead of looking at how we spent countless
nights on keeping Libav working with all upstreams.

>
> AFAICT, Blender upstream was (and probably is still) a big fan of FFmpeg
> library, been that used as default in their code. But they were also
> proficient in getting Libav working good and smooth in latest upstream
> releases.
>
> So, probably there won't be any evident difference between those two
> libraries in packaging. I could do some test buildings against FFmpeg
> once it hits the experimental suite (or whatever).
I think the gains from Libav/FFmpeg are on par but the costs of maintaining
Libav is higher since most upstreams (personal judgement, not backed
by hard data)
prefer and test FFmpeg.

>
> But, as a human being with a real-world-life, I'd prefer spending my
> spare time with my son than fixing FTBFS on Blender due to FFmpeg ;-P
We are no different from this aspect, I would like to make Debian's
Multimedia offering
as pleasant as possible in the least amount of time spent on it.
I see a big advantage in using the libs upstreams are testing their
code against.

I also think that keeping FFmpeg out of the archive is not fair. I
would like to have it
accepted by FTP Masters even if it is not going to be part of Jessie.

Cheers,
Balint



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