Re: reasons for split of libavcodec54 and libavcodec-extra-54, missing codecs and a metapackage.

[Reinhard Tartler <siretart@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Nov 22, 2014 at 4:11 AM, Fabian Greffrath <fabian@greffrath.com> wrote:
> I have two more ideas regarding this issue:
>
> 1) We have two library packages that conflict with each other. Why don't
> we have two -dev packages that conflict with each other, then?
>
> I suggest to introduce a new libavcodec-extra-dev package that depends
> on "libavcodec | libavcodec-extra" and change the libavcodec-dev package
> to only depend on the regular libavcodec. The shlibs need to get
> adjusted accordingly, of course.
>
> This way, maintainers have a means to consider the possible license
> clash at build time and we dont have to juggle conflicts with virtual
> packages.

Ideally, we could make packages that build-depend on
libavcodec-extra-dev make their resulting binary packages only
depending on libavcodec-extra-NN. However, I'm not sure how to
implement that.

> 2) There seem to be only very few packages which are at risk of a
> license clash when the libavcodec-extra package is installed. However,
> we currently treat this as the rule, not the exception.
>
> I suggest to turn the situation around and provide the GPLv3 codecs in
> the regular libavcodec package. For the few package for which this could
> impose a license problem, we should provide an extra GPLv2 package.

This seems to me like a lot of churn for very little gain. The
benefits do not seem compelling enough for me to alarm all
maintainers.


-- 
regards,
    Reinhard