[MPlayer-dev-eng] FFmpeg, svn:externals and where to go from here

[Diego Biurrun]

On Sat, Jan 22, 2011 at 09:16:59PM +0100, Clément Bœsch wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 22, 2011 at 08:53:36PM +0100, Diego Biurrun wrote:
> > The FFmpeg Subversion repository has been set readonly, we will not be
> > receiving any more updates from it.  The time has come to rethink the
> > MPlayer project structure and the way we handle external libraries that
> > we pull into our source tree.
> > 
> > I'm undecided what to do with FFmpeg.  I'd personally move towards
> > eliminating embedded library copies, but not everybody agrees.  I will
> > rev my patches for running staged configures and reusing the FFmpeg
> > build system more instead of duplicating it badly when I find the time.
> > 
> > Then there is libdvdread and libdvdnav.  There are many shared devs, but
> > the project is not under our direct control and we don't know if there
> > will be a git migration or not.
> > 
> > libdvdread/libdvdnav sees orders of magnitude less changes than FFmpeg.
> > IIRC (but please don't take my word for it and doublecheck) current
> > versions are widely available in distributions now.
> > 
> > I would suggest just dropping the svn:externals and using system versions
> > of these libraries.  The value added by the embedded copies is small, but
> > the complication is considerable due to the ties to infrastructure of
> > projects that are separate from MPlayer.
> 
> I personally agree with removing them from the tree and use system one.
> 
> Though, I'm not sure to understand what you plane to do for the FFmpeg
> repository, but using the system one will clearly lead to problems, there
> is too much potential different packaged versions of it…

By "system" I don't necessarily mean something that was installed by
the distro package manager.  Compiling your own recent libs can be a
requirement if we start to rely on whatever property that will only
appear in the next release of $library.

Diego