Select provider of libav* libraries

[Dmitry Smirnov]

On Mon, 18 May 2015 12:16:32 Reinhard Tartler wrote:
> > Interestingly Gentoo recently switched to FFmpeg by default [3] after
> > conducting
> > a survey [4]. About 300 people participated in that survey and the outcome
> > was rather clear:
> It saddens me to see people organizing votes where people participate that
> have no idea what they are voting about. How many of the 300 people that
> participated have tried to cherry pick a fix to libavcodec, or can even
> tell what the difference between libavcodec and libswscale is?

Voting among people who perfectly understands the problem would be 
unnecessary. But even votes from people who is not deeply into ffmpeg/libav 
differences are valuable because people have different perspectives. In this 
particular case the outcome was quite convincing unlike cases where ~51% is 
for something and ~49% is against (and everybody have a feeling that outcome 
is a mistake or mere twist of luck).
It may be appealing to discredit voters (and invalidate outcome) but in 
general Gentoo users are not that illiterate...


> It took very much work and a long time to get were we are today. It would be
> very sad to see this work undone.

We have opportunity to avoid even more work that is likely will be of little 
value in the future.


> Sensible for Debian? I'm not sure. You bring a number of good points, but
> there is a significant long-term risk with relying on a single genius
> developer. I'd rather love to see people working together than against each
> other, but that might be wishful thinking.
> 
> This is another way to explain why I'm so undecided what to recommend: On
> the one hand, I of course can follow the argument that technically, it
> appears easy to abandon libav and migrate Debian over to the FFmpeg variant
> and benefit from all the additional functionality that have accumulated
> over time. This adds additional significant risks. I can also see the
> argument that compared to other risks that we take (see mysql/mariadb,
> openoffice/libreoffice, etc.) this may or may not be acceptable.

Over time project with more "gravity" to attract contributors will evolve 
faster leaving another project behind with ever increasing gap. It affects 
long-term maintainability. We need to stay with more active project not only 
for features but due to pragmatic expectation that more active project will be 
better maintained.

-- 
Cheers,
 Dmitry Smirnov
 GPG key : 4096R/53968D1B

---

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the
humble reasoning of a single individual.
        -- Galileo Galilei
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