hi everybody I am requesting to the d-release team a lenny-ignore tag for bug 395252. There are multiple reasons for this request, please take some time to read ahead. --- Reason 1 : policy Recently, after a long discussion in bug 392362, a paragraph [4.13] was added to d-policy 3.8.0 stating (briefly) that: > Some software packages include in their distribution convenience > copies of code from other software packages [...] > Debian packages should not make use of these convenience copies unless > the included package is explicitly intended to be used in this way. This change was advertised in the email of early June by Russ Allbery to d-devel-announce, http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/06/msg00001.html The message starts by saying: > Please note that the Policy release cycle is not currently > well-synchronized with the release cycle, and adjusting to this version of > Policy is *not* a priority for the upcoming lenny release unless the > relevant provision has already separately been accepted as a release goal. I do not find [4.13] in http://release.debian.org/lenny/goals.txt , so I assume that "unless" part does not apply. So, the matter of bug 395252 (that was vehemently discussed there) is now settled once and for all in the debian policy. But there is an exception for lenny, and for this reason I am asking for a tag for this bug. [This also addresses a complaint of me and of Joey Hess, that is, why was mplayer singled out on this issue? Now no package is singled out, the bug is not RC for lenny, it will be RC for all packages after Lenny. I find this fair.] ---- Reason 2: it does not work The other reason is that I did not find a way to comply to the request. There are two problems. ---2.1 missing headers and code in -dev files When 'mplayer' is compiled, it uses a lot of *.h files from its embedded ffmpeg; moreover, its 'configure' file scans some *.c files to get the up-to-date listing of supported codecs etc etc. Unfortunately, the -dev binary packages generated by "ffmpeg-free" contain only a small part of all the needed stuff. This said, I manually copied all needed stuff so as to compile all code, but... ----2.2 the mplayer binary does not link with the "ffmpeg-free" libs. By reading and diffing, it would seem that the newer ffmpeg-free 0.svn20080206 source code seems compatible to the ffmpeg code shipped in mplayer... but unfortunately when I try to link, it fails. The error is in http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=395252#226 I think that the problem is that the 'ffmpeg-free' code in Debian does not contain all the upstream code; and then, to be able to compile, there are many quilt patches that affect the shipped code, and a restrictive 'configure' call. All this kills some symbols that 'mplayer' needs. Unfortunately I could not properly identify where and why this linking failure originates. This is why I add a 'help' tag to the bug. If there is some simple way out of this that I am overseeing, please tell. ------ reason 3: ffmpeg is in transition One insight that I got from all the above is that , to link mplayer to ffmpeg-free generated libraries, there are possibly many changes to be made in ffmpeg-free. But this is not a good time to change those libraries, that are in a transition. a. -- Andrea Mennucc "The EULA sounds like it was written by a team of lawyers who want to tell me what I can't do, and the GPL sounds like it was written by a human being who wants me to know what I can do." Anonymous, http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/420
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