13 Jan
2013
13 Jan
'13
10:03 a.m.
On Sun, Jan 13, 2013 at 9:54 AM, Fritz Meissner <meissner.fritz(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:
On 13 January 2013 11:13, Dan MacDonald <allcoms(a)gmail.com> wrote:
That is a shame then, but the cases of cdrecord and Mozilla are quite
different and not the fault of the Debian community.
Big changes to a distro ie swapping out a lib which many apps depend on for
a new one should really get voted on but I'm not aware that ever happened
here - I expect not.
In all three of these examples it wasn't the
fault of the Debian
maintainers that these alternate versions get used, it was the authors of
the software switching from Free a software license such as the GPL to one
that the Debian social contract no longer considers free or trying to
enforce copyright on corporate logos or whatever.
I'm not aware that there was any licence change in the ffmpeg/libav
situation ? It just seems to have been a personality and development style
issue between maintainers. I hear that Debian's decision was based on the
fact the Debian maintainer concerned was a member of the libav camp, rather
than any real technical issue.
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
libav developers need to change command line options is beyond me - the
least they could have done is keep to the established ffmpeg formats. There
seems to be no functional reason for it, just a desire to be different.
Agreed - they should've aimed to keep the same commands as used by ffmpeg.
I've not tried using libav from cli yet so I can only hope they've
simplified its commands as ffmpeg was hardly the easiest command line
program to use but staying true to upstream would've still been the
preference on most I'm sure.