Update to Speex

[Jean-Marc Valin]

> Well do you refer to 1.2beta on your downloads page as 'unstable'
> http://www.speex.org/downloads/

The "unstable" mainly refers to the fact that I can't promise I won't
break the API/ABI for new features. In terms of the codec, while there's
a bit less QA, that hasn't caused problem in any of the unstable releases.

> libspeex is one of most popular packages being installed on some 75% of 
> debian machines http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=speex
> 
> We thus have to take a fairly conservative approach to updates because if
> we get something wrong it will effect a lot of people.

Yes, I understand that. Fortunately, the things that sometimes break are
generally corner cases (e.g. DTX) that are not used by most software in
Debian. If anything that would affect Debian breaks, I would expect to
receive flames within only a few days of breaking it in svn/git. So any
actual release with no complaints for about a month should be considered
fairly safe.

About upgrading to 1.2beta2, do you think if would be possible to
backport the library split to 1.2beta2 so applications can start being
updated right now (instead of waiting for 1.2beta3)?

>> Seriously, there's no point in keeping 1.1.12 in stable because it's
>> just an older unstable release. Consider 1.2beta2 as 1.1.14 (that's
>> actually how it's identified internally). 
> 
> I don't disagree, and have done some testing here.  But if 1.2beta is
> solid, then you as upstream could always release this without the beta tag.
> There is a mental advantage in not having a beta tag, unless that is really
> what it is..

Well, the beta is mainly because of the new features that are now in
libspeexdsp library and haven't yet fully stabilised. For the codec
itself (libspeex), it's mainly a matter of finishing some fixed-point
work and making sure all the corner cases on all the corner platforms
(sizeof(char)==sizeof(int) anyone!) work.

>> Hope this clarifies things. Any questions?
> 
> What are the forward release plans for 1.2?

I think 1.2 isn't very far, it's just that the time I have is limited.
In addition to what I mentioned above, I'd like to have better
documentation for 1.2 and a few minor things like that.

> As you say it has been a long time since 1.0.5 and speex is now very
> widely deployed across all distributions.
> 
> It would be good if you could release an baseline freeze with the 
> libspeex and then move onto the more unstable elements of
> libspeexdsp.

What do you mean here?

Cheers,

	Jean-Marc