Bug#613071: gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg: libavcodec52 (<< 5:0) necessary?

[Sebastian Dröge]

On Sat, 2011-02-26 at 16:09 +0100, Christoph Anton Mitterer wrote:
> [...]
> 
> Nevertheles,... and in all doing respect, I don't think that it should
> be the decision of any Debian maintainer to decide which packages people
> use or not, unless there are real technical problems which justify
> conflicts/breaks and that like.
> Otherwise this is not really "open".

As explained, there are technical problems with the DMO packages. It
happened a few times in the last months that the DMO ffmpeg packages did
not work at all with gst-ffmpeg because of some changes in ffmpeg and
minor changed behaviour.

The Debian ffmpeg maintainer handles such things properly by notifying
maintainers of packages that are using ffmpeg but DMO does not care at
all about this. And then people start complaining that GStreamer sucks
because nothing works anymore...

> If there are annoying upstream bug reports, than this is something that
> at best upstream should deal with DMO and even that is questionable,
> because as we're "open" people should have the right to use what they
> want (and report what they want) which they can do whether DMO exists or
> not.
> Anyway, it's at least not Debian's business to take care of this.

gst-ffmpeg is very sensitive to ffmpeg changes and for that reason
upstream only provides support if the internal ffmpeg snapshot of
gst-ffmpeg is used. Because the Debian security team does not want
multiple ffmpeg copies in the archive for obvious reasons and because
the Debian ffmpeg package is maintained very good we still get upstream
support for our packages.

Of course people should be allowed to use what they want but in this
case people often don't even know what they're doing and there were
multiple bugreports in Debian and upstream where people didn't know they
were using the DMO packages. I'm not going to continue to waste my time
with these problems caused by third party packages.

FWIW, a cleaner solution would probably be to add a conflict against the
exact ffmpeg revision that starts to break gst-ffmpeg but for DMO users
this doesn't really make a difference and just conflicting with the DMO
packages is the easier solution for me.

> Last but not least, now, DMO simply provides it's own
> gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg, without that annoying dependency.
> So what is good for? Except cluttering up the original package with
> useless dependencies.

Sounds like a good solution, that way it's immediately obvious from the
package version in bugreports that the DMO gst-ffmpeg packages are used
and bug reports can be closed upstream (unless the bug can be reproduced
with a good ffmpeg version) and bugreports in Debian can simply be
closed.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-gstreamer-maintainers/attachments/20110226/b36c1d55/attachment.pgp>