debian-multimedia.org considered harmful - redux

[Benjamin Drung]

Am Mittwoch, den 04.04.2012, 17:02 +0200 schrieb Stefano Zacchiroli:
> On Wed, Apr 04, 2012 at 01:07:44PM +0200, Alessio Treglia wrote:
> > Stefano, I think it's time to give you a clear answer, which is:
> > 
> >     Yes, we consider debian-multimedia.org more harmful than useful
> >     to the Debian Project and its users.
> 
> Thanks Alessio. If there are other voices on this matter, please speak
> up. I'd be glad to volunteer to contact, again, Christian to come to an
> amicable solution if possible. But I don't want to discover half-way
> through that the team opinions on this matter are more diverse than what
> it seems from the complaint threads.
> 
> I'll postpone the issue for a week more or so, before contacting
> Christian. Please speak up before then if you feel any differently than
> Alessio's quote above.
> 
> Similarly, if you object to me contacting Christian on behalf of the
> Project and this team: please speak up.

I agree with Alessio, and here are my reasons:

1) Some users think that debian-multimedia.org is part of Debian, but it
is not.

2) Some users think that the Debian Multimedia Maintainers team is
responsible for/maintains debian-multimedia.org. The Debian Multimedia
Maintainers team is a team within Debian, but debian-multimedia.org is
run by Christian.

3) Christian doesn't seem to want to collaborate with the Debian
Multimedia Maintainers team. He packaged libdvbcsa 1.1.0 in his archive.
Alessio packaged it too and uploaded it to Debian unstable yesterday.
Instead of removing libdvbcsa and using the one from Debian, Christian
bumped the epoch of his package for no obvious reasons[2].

Point one and two led to angry user bug reports against the vlc package
in Debian, which were caused by debian-multimedia.org. One user failed
to see that the vlc package from debian-multimedia.org has bumped the
epoch, which prevents updating vlc from 1:1.1.13-0.0 to 2.0.0-1 [3].

[1] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-multimedia-maintainers/2012-April/025861.html
[2] The changelog entry only says "Hop, hop hop."
[3] http://bugs.debian.org/660924

-- 
Benjamin Drung
Debian & Ubuntu Developer
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