Re: Reintroducing FFmpeg to Debian

[Wookey <wookey@wookware.org>]

+++ Andreas Cadhalpun [2014-07-28 01:20 +0200]:
> Hi all,
> 
> some of you may have noticed a weird ffmpeg package in the NEW queue[1].
> Let me explain:

>  * Ok, let's say I'm a multimedia maintainer and want to try out
>    building my package against your ffmpeg, what should I do?
> 
> Any maintainer interested in switching should get in touch, and we'll
> gladly help preparing the transition. 

> The FFmpeg version currently in NEW has been there for more than
> 2 months and is thus outdated. If you want to test the current
> packages, you can build them from the repository on Alioth [17]
> (e.g. using git-buildpackage).

Thanks for doing this work. I too am a bystander in the ffmpeg/libav
debate but I have an interest due to having fixed up the ubuntu and
deb-multimedia mythtv packages for Debian:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=570611
http://wookware.org/software/repo/pool/main/m/mythtv/

Those packages work and and been patched to use libav. However I have
found a few bugs in real usage (like crashing after 40mins). Because
upstream deveop exclusively with ffmpeg it would be very useful to
rebuild tose packages against ffmpeg and see if they work the
same/better/worse.

Thanks for providing info on how to do this. Personally I'd like to
see ffmpeg in debian so I could trivially build against it and (quite
probably) use it by default if available, simply because it's inline
with upstream and less likely to break.

I really don't see sufficient reasons why we shouldn't at least put it
experimental so that maintainers can easily test this stuff. Yes the
whole fork thing has worked out most unfortunately, but ISTM that
Andreas' packaging is a sensible way to let maintainers use this
package or libav and easily test with both.

Yes, in theory I could fix up any bugs due to divergence between the
two libraries but that's not going to happen in practice as I know
nothing of multimedia libraries and codecs. I just want a mythtv
package in Debian (as opposed to debian-multimedia and ubuntu where
they have been for years), and am happy to do packaging-level work to
make that happen.

(I've also been a tad busy with arm64 and cross toolchains and
bootstrapping to make anything other than very slow progress on this
project...)

But overall, I vote for letting it through new.

Wookey
-- 
Principal hats:  Linaro, Emdebian, Wookware, Balloonboard, ARM
http://wookware.org/