Migrating your packages from celt to opus

[Ron]

Hi,

If you've received this, it's because you are listed as maintaining a package
that currently depends on celt (my apologies to those who may have got two
copies of it by being behind a maintainer group alias also).

As you hopefully all already know, the experimental celt codec has evolved
into Opus, a standard endorsed by the IETF codec working group.  We now have
packages of Opus available in Sid, which I'd like to encourage you all to
move to now, as quickly as we possibly can.

I know this is very short notice in the lead up to the freeze, and I'd have
loved to have this for you sooner too, but the timing of being able to ship
this has been somewhat out of our control.


I'd really like us to be able to remove the current celt packages from Wheezy.
We had tried to get all of the distros to agree to shipping the 0.7.1 version,
so that there would be some semblance of interoperability between them, but
unfortunately, that never actually eventuated.  Celt is no longer maintained
upstream, and apps using it are basically only interoperable with themselves,
and for the most part, then only with the same version of themselves on the
same distro.

Opus is now bitstream and API frozen, so the celt experiment is officially
now over.  We (meaning myself and upstream) would really like to avoid having
an old version of it still shipping in the distro for several years to come,
and having apps which could and should now be using the interoperable Opus
standard, still using it instead.  Nothing will be able to decode these old
celt streams, and nobody will be supporting the library should bugs be found
in it.

So in the best interests of yourselves, your users, (and us!), I ask you to
please look into moving from celt to opus at the soonest opportunity.  The
upstream maintainers of many projects should already be in the loop with
this happening, so for those who planned ahead, this should be minimal work
to do now.

Should it not be possible to migrate to opus in this time frame, you should
probably consider disabling celt support anyway - I haven't quite decided
what the best thing to do will be if not all apps can move, but since they
won't be able to interoperate with anything else anyway, removing celt still
seems like the right thing for us to do at this point.  So if you have some
counterpoint to that, please do let me know!


Anyhow, I can't possibly apologise enough for the short notice, we all wish
we'd had this available sooner, and it wasn't even certain that we'd have it
available now - so it's been hard to make promises with timelines attached
for people.  Now that we have it though, I'd really like to see as many apps
and libs as possible not miss the boat for adopting it for the next release.

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask.

 Thanks!
 Ron