ffmpeg status?

[Loïc Minier]

On Tue, Jun 17, 2008, Fabian Greffrath wrote:
> Anyway, however we deicide, the source name should be as neutral as 
> possible [1] and only describe, *what* we did to the source and not 
> *why* we did it (since this would imply that there is something wrong 
> with the original source).

 I personally think we should just describe that we touched the source,
 not why nor what; just that we changed it.  This is exactly the same as
 SCm branches: master/trunk/mainline/dev/HEAD or
 feature-foo/cleanup/debian/ubuntu/upstream/topic-bar branches.  I think
 we maintain a Debian branch of ffmpeg, I don't quite understand why the
 "ffmpeg-debian" name would have bad conotations from an upstream PoV.

 Perhaps I need more info from you guys about why this sounds bad for
 upstream?

 Anyway, when I'm maintaining a branch of a software for Debian, I name it
 "debian" and for Ubuntu, "ubuntu".  :-)

> I propose ffmpeg-stripped.

 It's closer to what I had in mind, it does reflect the fact that we
 strip the source, but not that we might patch it; we might be merging
 functionality provided by Debian bug reporters, backport functionality,
 add support for more arches -- we don't know yet.  The complexity of
 ffmpeg and its relevance in most multimedia playbacks scenarii makes it
 likely to be patched in Debian often.


 My /personal/ opinion is that changing the source in Debian ways, to
 comply to ftpmasters wishes or any other Debian bodies or standards is
 something which can happen to ANY package; I personally don't rename
 source packages for this; I do change the upstream version number when
 the changes are temporary.  I believe documenting in debian/copyright,
 README.Debian and README.Source ought to be enough for Debian
 consumers.
   Again, I do understand that some people feel strongly that this is an
 abuse of the upstream software name; when these people are upstream,
 this puts us into the same situation as firefox -> iceweasel, or ion3,
 or cdrecord, but this is relatively uncommon.
   So *I* would be perfectly happy with the "ffmpeg" shipped by the
 Debian project to be named "ffmpeg" and count on people downloading it
 to understand that Debian modifies its source packages with patches and
 might even strip some parts of them from time to time.  Would I be
 searching for ffmpeg in other distros, I'd search for ffmpeg, not for
 ffmpeg-free, or ffmpeg-gentoo.
   But since you are both arguing in favor of renaming the source, I
 prefer a stable name overtime reflecting that we changed ffmpeg for
 Debian and only that; ffmpeg-debian sounds like such a name. :)


 PS: The best reason to rename source packages I know of is naturally
 when you need multiple versions / branches of the same software in
 Debian, for example db4.x packages, python2.y, or gcc-foo.  I HATE
 renames because of the administrative load and he loss of some history.
 Typically, PTS subscriptions, PTS uploads, tags in SVN, tarballs being
 renamed, ftpmasters touching overrides, bug reports etc. etc.  Debian
 infrastructure just doesn't follow source package renames that well.
 :-/   Not counting things living outside of the project such as
 snapshot.debian.net or derivatives which will have to merge ffmpeg-free
 against ffmpeg-new-debian name!  ;)

-- 
Loïc Minier