Select provider of libav* libraries

[Fabian Greffrath]

Dear Reinhard,

Am Samstag, den 30.05.2015, 17:54 -0400 schrieb Reinhard Tartler: 
> - Fabian, you were counted as in favor of switching to FFmpeg. In the
> light of the most recent posting from Andreas, the mails that Balint
> kindly forwarded, and my thoughts, would you approve and support
> moving Debian from Libav in favor of FFmpeg?

Yes. I have already expressed my opinion before:
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-multimedia-maintainers/2015-May/044078.html

Having a dysfunctional bug tracker online for months, knowingly, and
missing a codec that I need for my work was enough for me to get
frustrated with the project. Also, I don't buy the "it might not get
your work done but it has a cleaner API" argument. And I also don't
think that "boring code with less commits is easier to maintain" because
it is apparently missing many important commits that would actually do
good to the code.

You mention the "bus factor" of ffmpeg. First, there are many
open-source projects with such a high bus factor, take for example
Postfix or the Linux kernel. However, none of these projects will go
down the drain if something bad happens to the main developer (god
forbid!). They will recover and live on by their other contributors,
maybe with a slower pace, but they will not vanish off the face of the
earth (ffmpeg has proven very resistant towards such predictions
already). Second, what would happen if something bad happened to Michael
Niedermeyer (again, god forbid!)? Then ffmpeg wouldn't have a dedicated
developer anymore who takes care of security and other issues full-time.
But, you know, libav doesn't even have this one developer in the first
place. So, it seems like libav has already been hit by the bus that you
are afraid may hit ffmpeg one day. The situation would be nearly the
same.


Cheers,

Fabian

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