[FFmpeg-devel] Reintroducing FFmpeg to Debian

[Matthias Urlichs]

Hi,

Alessio Treglia:
> We've spent a lot of time over the past months talking to upstreams,
> forwarding them our patches and make sure their programs and libraries
> work with libav.
> We've spent ***months*** in making the whole thing work, and dropping
> libav in favour of FFmpeg at this point, roughly few weeks from the
> freeze deadline, would be definitely insane.
> 
Yes, that work might be "wasted". But I don't think that it's a good idea
to base the decision of whether or not X is better for Debian on the fact
that somebody did a lot of work for Y instead.

Yes, the freeze is not that far away. But frankly, how much effort would it
be to switch now? As far as I can tell from this discussion, the answer is
"not a whole lot". The bulk of ffmpeg/libav's reverse dependencies is just
a simple binNMU away, and as the libraries seem to be co-installable we
don't even need a big transition.

We'd also benefit from the fact that Upstream tends to use FFmpeg. I'd
hate to report some intractable codec bug which Upstream closes with an
"it works with FFmpeg" comment -- what would you recommend me to do in
that situation, next year -- install the ffmpeg libs from Experimental
and rebuild the offender?

-- 
-- Matthias Urlichs