Re: Bug#763148: Prevent migration to jessie
Hi Michael,
On 03.10.2014 02:10, Michael Gilbert wrote:
On Thu, Oct 2, 2014 at 1:16 PM, Andreas Cadhalpun wrote:
So I hope the maintainer of chromium is now happy to be able to use more
system libraries.
chromium moves way too fast to take advantage of any stable ffmpeg
api.
How did you come to this conclusion?
As soon as a new ffmpeg is out, they use it whether it breaks
abi/api or not,
Yet the currently packaged chromium embeds a version of FFmpeg from
around May this year, i.e. approximately lagging two upstream versions
behind.
The ABI won't be a problem, when chromium is built against system
FFmpeg. (Unless it is broken on purpose, see e.g.
fix_for_system_ffmpeg_ABI.patch.)
So only API changes could cause problems, but e.g. adapting chromium to
the current FFmpeg version is quite trivial.
And chromium doesn't really use brand new FFmpeg API, e.g. the newest
two functions used are from July and March 2013.
so it's unsupportable to dynamically link over a
stable release lifetime.
In the case that chromium starts using newer API during the lifetime of
a stable release, there are several options to handle that:
* revert to the old API
* disable new features
* add the needed functionality to FFmpeg
* or as a last resort, disable using the system FFmpeg
I'm quite confident that we would come up with a sensible solution, if
such a problem would arise.
But I don't think that the mere possibility of such problems is a
sufficient reason to disregard Debian policy, which clearly states that
embedded code copies should not be used.
This is especially the case, if it prevents the properly packaged
library and the command line tools from being part of the stable release.
Best regards,
Andreas
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