Select provider of libav* libraries

[Bálint Réczey]

Hi Andreas,

2015-06-05 0:28 GMT+02:00 Andreas Cadhalpun <andreas.cadhalpun at googlemail.com>:
...
>> That's not only because of optimization, but also for licensing
>> issues: The lib*-extra-* packages are licensed with GPLv3+, which is
>> not acceptable for the majority of applications in debian.
>>
>> Note that it does not matter whether or not there are GPLv3+
>> applications in the archive. These -extra- package do provide
>> additional functionality that users do appreciate. However, we cannot
>> provide that in the "standard" libav* packages because we do have
>> GPLv2-only applications that we must not link against a GPLv3
>> libavcodec.
>
> The current implementation of the extra flavor doesn't prevent using it
> with a GPLv2-only program and thus is effectively nearly as bad as just
> enabling the GPLv3 code in the standard build.
> Adding a mechanism to prevent this would make the extra flavor even
> more complex.
The aim is not preventing GPLv3 usage, but offering a choice for
reverse dependencies.
GPLv2 only packages can build-depend on only the GPLv2 compatible -dev
packages, while packages compatible with GPLv3 can include FFmpeg's
GPLv3 -dev packages in the build dependencies as well.

I don't have the numbers on the GPLv2-only packages, but if there are
important ones which can't be relicensed this may make a good reason
for providing separate GPLv2 and GPLv3 compatible libraries.

Cheers,
Balint