Bug#729203: CTTE and reasonable solutions

[Jonathan Dowland <jmtd@debian.org>]

Hi Rogério, thanks for looking into resolving this situation.

I haven't read every last mail in the history of this issue and recently
have confined myself to just this bug. There's obviously a detailed
history and a lot of animosity.

I'd say first and foremost, I miss ffmpeg most as a command-line tool.
The tools that link to libav (VLC etc.) seem to continue to work fine
from a user's perspective. I appreciate that there might be a lot of
pain for maintainers below the water line (more on that later). Reading
some of the comments on this bug, I think many users are similarly
missing ffmpeg as a command line tool and are not as concerned about the
library side of things.

So, I fully support packaging ffmpeg as a binary package for the command
line client at the very least, and perhaps as a necessary first step.

If the debian multimedia team are not interested in doing that, fine,
they don't have to. But it would be wrong for them IMHO to prevent some
other interested party from doing so.

Back to maintainers linking against libav. You have said yourself that
the effort involved to get e.g. handbrake to work with Debian's libav
was herculean (not your exact words I know). I believe that, if ffmpeg
libraries and libav libraries can co-exist in the archive, it should be
a maintainer's choice which they link against. So, if it were possible
for ffmpeg's libraries to be packaged without interfering with existing
clients of libav's libraries, a maintainer such as yourself for
handbrake[1] could choose to use ffmpeg, that would be the maintainer's
right.

I suspect that the animosity I've read in this thread from people
towards ffmpeg in the archive as libraries is due to concerns about how
practical it would be for them to co-exist. These are probably valid
concerns that should be looked at. However, they can be, by exploring
real packaging attempts outside the archive (or using experimental)
rather than arguing about theoretics.

So as a first step and addressing many of the requests here I think we
should push on to get the binary packaged on it's own, for now.  A good
starting place would be a git repository for the packaging.  Should we
base this on the pre-libav ffmpeg package, or start afresh?

[1] perhaps a bad example since it's yourself with the debian multimedia
    team...