Select provider of libav* libraries

[Reinhard Tartler]

On Sat, Oct 4, 2014 at 11:46 AM, Bálint Réczey <balint at balintreczey.hu> wrote:

> I would also like to add that since Libav and FFmpeg offer different
> features they are different enough to consider them as alternates
> which have the place in Debian on their own right.

This is the part that makes me very uneasy, because that is a
statement that neither FFmpeg nor Libav upstream hold (Libav largely
ignores what FFmpeg says or does, and FFmpeg claims to have all
features of Libav because of the daily merges).

I think it is fair to say that both ffmpeg and libav share a large set
of common functionality. This can be seen by the fact that both
provide a set of competing shared libraries. I am not really convinced
that this sort of competition is helpful to Debian. In fact, I see it
rather harmful, as it fragments our archive in packages in two camps.

I claim that the majority of packages involved in the last two
libavformat/libavcodec library transitions do not care what package
provides libavformat.so/libavcodec.so (and their dependencies). In
what way does the choice between the libavcodec.so provide help them?
I see a great potential for confusion here, for rather little gain.

I would rather see people help with improving Libav, which provides a
cleaner and leaner codebase and is supported by an upstream with a
much more responsible development process. Just take the recent
shellshock drama as an example for what happens if you integrate
questionable (or simply too much) functionality in a widely used piece
of software.

I do understand that VDPAU doesn't work with XBMC when using libav.
Note that this seems to be specific to XBMC, because both mpv and vlc
seem to use libav's VDPAU capabilities just fine. I've raised this on
IRC a few hours ago and it is being looked at. For the future, VDPAU
is currently being overhauled in libav/master. I think it is fair to
say that this issue is being taken seriously, although the reaction
could definitely be more rapid.


> PS: I would like to see the Libav and FFmpeg forks merging under any
> name they pick, but this is unlikely to happen before Jessie's freeze.
> Maybe before Jessie+1...

I fully agree here, and would love to help on making that happen. But
before that can happen, both projects need to sort out the outstanding
trust issues, and agree on a common development process. At least
that's my take-away from the most recent discussion threads on
debian-devel@ and elsewhere.

-- 
regards,
    Reinhard