tvheadend for Debian

[Didier 'OdyX' Raboud]

Hi again Adam,

Le vendredi, 1 mars 2013, 22.36:42 Adam Sutton a écrit :
> In short, no. I'm not interested in managing official packages in
> distro's etc... It's enough work just helping to maintain the code.

Thanks for your answer.

> We provide the launchpad PPA simply because it keeps "most" of our
> users happy and is the best way to get most users running up to date
> code. We will soon, hopefully, move the repo to self-hosted and then
> we'll probably include some additional packages.
> 
> However if other people want to maintain a distro official package
> then I've no problem with that, though it'd be nice to maintain a
> dialog and ensure things are flowing back and forth etc...

Actually, now that I have a concrete need, and after having tried 
tvheadend, I'd like to package and maintain tvheadend for Debian. Of 
course, I'm willing and interested in having a good dialog between you-
as-upstream, and me (and other interested Debian enthousiasts).

For now, I have identified the following concerns for an inclusion in 
Debian, and I'd welcome your opinion on those:

= Version choice =

It's not exactly obvious (to me) from https://tvheadend.org which 
version we should pick. I've started with the v3.4patch1 tag on GitHub, 
which I identify as 3.4.27. Would that be the good version to provide to 
our users? We also have the possibility to use experimental for more 
bleeding-edge versions; which would these be?

= ExtJS embedded version =

ExtJS is embedded in the GitHub repository and is installed by the build 
scripts. We, at Debian, don't like embedded code copies much (they're a 
licensing, security and maintenance headache), and actively repack and 
patch where possible. That said, it's not a very big problem (as libjs-
extjs is in the Debian repositories), but much more a convenience thing. 
Would it be possible to replace it in the repository by a git submodule? 
That would certainly help.

= GPL vs OpenSSL = 

I'm aware that Licensing it's a hot topic for tvheadend, currently (?) 
deciding whether to stick with GPLv3, downgrade to GPLv2, CLA, etc. From 
the Debian perspective, all of GPLv2, GPLv3 and CLAs are fine; but there 
is one aspect of licensing that is problematic: the linking of tvheadend 
(GPLv{2,3}) with OpenSSL. Debian (but many others too) consider these 
two licenses incompatible, making the resulting binary undistributable 
by Debian. See the following links:

	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSSL#Licensing
	https://lintian.debian.org/tags/possible-gpl-code-linked-with-openssl.html
	https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/

There are various ways to solve this, in order of preference:

a) Amend tvheadend's license to add the OpenSSL exception, ideally in 
all released versions;
b) Rewrite the tvheadend parts that depend on OpenSSL to depend on 
GnuTLS (or PolarSSL) instead, thereby solving the license conflict.
b) Truncate tvheadend from all parts needing OpenSSL (but that might 
very well be inpossible

= Varia & communication =

While updating the packaging, there were various minor things that I 
would have liked to see changed, how would you prefer to see these 
discussed? I can open issues on TVheadend's Redmine if that works for 
you.

I'm looking forwards to pushing tvheadend to Debian, with your help!

Cheers,
OdyX