Select provider of libav* libraries

[Reinhard Tartler]

On Sat, Jun 6, 2015 at 1:51 PM, Bálint Réczey <balint at balintreczey.hu> wrote:
>> The problem is that Debian users must be allowed to redistribute it,
>> but as far as I understand it, it is not allowed to distribute e.g.
>> a live DVD with hedgewars and libavcodec-extra installed.
>> I also pointed this out in the previous discussion [1].
> I'm not absolutely sure, but IMO yes, such Live DVD-s would not be
> allowed, but it is a problem of live DVD makers to care about. Package
> maintainers can't and should not prevent this usage.

Why would you think that distributing the packages libavcodec-extra
and hedgewars on the same Live media would create a derived work that
must fulfill all licenses?

I fail to spot the problem here.

If you want to be extra careful, just install the regular GPLv2+
libavcodec package, which according to the dependencies of the
hedgewars package should work just fine.

>>> Since the hassle makes more work for active ffmpeg maintainers and
>>> while I sponsored a few uploads I don't consider myself one I should
>>> not make the call, but it would be really nice to provide the AMR
>>> encoder as well in Debian and also keeping hedgewars in the archive.
>>>
>>> Maybe there is a way of providing libavcodec-extra and having modern
>>> packaging scripts. Maybe patching the build could help, but I have not
>>> checked this idea.
>>
>> The AMR encoder is anyway just a wrapper around libopencore/libvo.
>> Gstreamer also has similar wrappers and since they are plugins, the
>> license is less of a problem.
>> Thus anyone really wanting to encode AMR can use gstreamer.

Except those that want or need to use the "avconv" or "ffmpeg"
command-line utilities.

> I'm OK with disabling AMR encoder in ffmpeg and stay GPLv2 compatible
> with the packages since I have no packages requiring it nor use-cases
> as a user requiring it, but I prefer the choice provided by by current
> libav packaging.

Thanks for the support!

> Would it be hard to patch the build system?

To do what exactly? The current libav packaging already implements
this in a way that the user can choose what packages to install.

On a personal note: The libav packaging can surely be improved and
simplified. But throwing away years of work just because, and knowing
about the regressions for the sake of simplicity feels wrong.

Reinhard