[FFmpeg-devel] Reintroducing FFmpeg to Debian

[Jean-Yves Avenard]

On 9 August 2014 17:03, Matthias Urlichs <matthias at urlichs.de> wrote:

> Most forks cause additional work which, in the long term, is better spent
> elsewhere. The ffmpeg/libav split is ample proof of that; in an ideal
> world, you wouldn't need the mythtv fork either.
>
> Debian's position is that we _really_ want to avoid having multiple copies
> of essentially the same code in the archive; it's additional work for the
> security team (if they even know about the copies), needlessly eats memory
> when the two are in use simultaneously, and causes no end of trouble when a
> plug-in is linked against copy A while the main code (or another plugin)
> uses copy B (unless everybody is very careful WRT symbol versioning).

I beg to differ.

What would be a massive amount of waste, both in time and resources,
would be to have a project such as MythTV having to handle multiple
versions of a dependency.

Especially one such as libav* where the API changes often, and more
often than not in a totally incompatible manner from one API to the
next.
Including rename of constants (code enums id for example). You would
have to keep your own headers (like what Firefox/Mozilla is doing) and
have multiple code paths only adding to the difficulty of proper
coverage testing...

Keeping your own static version is the only reasonable approach.
As far as naming and conflicts, I don't see what the problem is unless
it's improperly packaged, or for example when the packagers decide
that they know better than the original authors and start to do weird
thing, modify the code as they wish. That's where the issues are most
of the time.
Sounds familiar ? :)