On 01/13/2013 04:54 AM, Fritz Meissner wrote: > I cannot speak about technical matters, but the change is extremely > inconvenient because of all the outside packages which are set up to call > ffmpeg and now need to be hand-configured for libav (I'm talking about > setting up subsonic to run on an Ubuntu 12.10 server here). And why the While I'm still on 12.04 for our media server, I've been getting my ffmpeg from here since I discovered the change (when the fake ffmpeg from the libav package crashed on my vacation video... known bug with lots of reports... worked fine in the real ffmpeg, of course): https://launchpad.net/~jon-severinsson/+archive/ffmpeg This is not a solution. It's just a workaround until the stupid political situation resolves itself. But it does work, as long as you're able to use PPAs and the backports repository (for home use, that shouldn't be a big deal). I love the claims by the libav developer/fake-ffmpeg Debian maintainer that packages of the real ffmpeg "subtly break" other Debian packages. Well, buddy, your fake ffmpeg is more than subtly broken. Which wouldn't matter if you weren't claiming it were ffmpeg. The same thing happened to annoying effect when Debian switched from "gqview" to "geeqie". Yes, gqview is an unmaintained app. But after 3 years, geeqie still has regressions, especially with regard to file management (you don't get to see the image you're about to overwrite when there's a name collision, there's no auto rename, etc.) Someone filed a bug about it over a year ago, but while the developers of forks declare their forks to be the real thing in announcements, when it comes to their bug tracker, what would have been a regression stopping release of the real thing is treated as a feature request in a fork. It's not like there was some license issue with the original file replace dialog; the fork developers just decided they could do better, ripped it out and then never got around to rewriting it. Probably not a big deal for people who use gqview purely as a fast image viewer, but a significant portion of the userbase used it as an image management tool as well. The biggest issue is these "transitional packages", which are nothing but a symbolic link to the fork with the real program's name. If the developers themselves are renaming the package and it's otherwise just a minor update, fine, use a transitional package. But if you're choosing a fork over the original one for political reasons -- and anything other than "the original program has an unpatched remote exploit and we don't have commit access" is a political reason -- and that fork is missing features or is unstable, putting a broken package out there under a different name to stop dependencies from breaking creates more problems than just saying "We don't support the original package anymore because someone on the internet made us mad" would have. In the case of ffmpeg, they get bonus points for claiming to be ffmpeg while also claiming that ffmpeg is deprecated. It's literally fraudulent, simultaneously trying to benefit from ffmpeg's name while smearing it as obsolete. I'd like to see a solution where maintainers are dismissed for making policy decisions for emotional reasons, But the thing about unpaid volunteers, on or offline, is that you have to put up with prima donnas now and then. These are two such cases. At least we Ubuntu users have PPAs and the ability to freeze package versions. Rob _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
