Enabling and installing of "risky" ("patented") codecs - made easy

[Fabian Greffrath]

Before I send the initial thread to -devel, I'd like to ask you what you 
think about installer packages? These could download the source tarballs 
from sourceforge (where they are officially hosted) and provide the 
debian/ packaging (or maybe even download it from SVN) and start a 
scripted dpkg-buildpackage. There are already similar installer-packages 
available in Debian, think of flashplugin-nonfree, googleearth-package 
or java-package.  Not sure if a package that downloads a patented codec 
and helps building another package around it should be in 'main' or 
'contrib' or maybe even another (new) category? Another more 
sophisticated approach could be similar to module-assistant, maybe 
codec-assistent, that downloads sources and builds packages 
'automagically' like 'c-a a-i lame'.

Cheers,
Fabian