multimedia-blends: policy question(s)

[Felipe Sateler]

On 11 June 2015 at 15:41, "IOhannes m zmölnig (Debian/GNU)"
<umlaeute at debian.org> wrote:
> hi, esp ross,
>
> i was having a look at the multimedia-blends package, and would like to
> change the categorization of a few package i (co)maintain.
>
> should i just go ahead and commit them, or does this require some
> discussion?
>

I would say yes. After all, if we end up disagreeing, git revert-ing is easy.

>
> furthermore, i noticed that the various tasks mainly use the *Depends*
> relationship.
> now i'm not an expert with blends, but personally i think that 'Depends'
> should be avoided as much as possible (in general).

The blends machinery automatically demotes all Depends to Recommends.
See the generated packages[1].

I'm not sure if Recommends are demoted to Suggests.


[1] eg https://packages.debian.org/sid/multimedia-soundsynthesis


>
> in general i think there are too many packages in the various tasks
> (e.g. it might make sense to factor out the entire pd-clan from
> "soundsynthesis", as most of those packages don't deal with sound
> synthesis at all; darn - did i just here me volunteer to maintain a
> "puredata" task?)

:)

I don't think we need per-application-ecosystem metapackages.
Non-soundsynth packages like gem should of course not be in the
soundsynth package, maybe we need a videosynth package?

> anyhow: if i want to some record some audio, i would select the
> "recording" task, which will installs by (among other things):
> at least (at a first glance) 4 multitrack recorders (3 of them via Depends)
> - ardour
> - ardour3

Wasn't ardour3 to be renamed ardour for v4? Then we would have just one.

> - qtractor
> - ecasound
> (though for whatever reasons audicity is missing)
> and a few tools which i fail to see why they are in "recording" at all
> (only listing a few select Depends-packages):
> - jackd

This is a bit odd (it should probably be indirectly pulled in by the
app that wants it).

> - qjackctl

But this is not. If we know ardour needs jack (this is no longer the
case apparently?), installing qjackctl makes a lot of sense.

> - ffmulticonverter

Quite possibly you need to transcode your resulting audio for distribution?

-- 

Saludos,
Felipe Sateler