Package: media-types Version: 2.0.0 Severity: wishlist Dear Maintainer,
I've noticed (the hard way) that the application/x-shockwave-flash media type for SWF files had been removed at the beginning of the year. I don't know what the criteria for inclusion of media types in this package are; but although the official end of life of Adobe Flash player has now indeed reached its date at the end of 2020, I would like to argue that the SWF file format is far from just dead. Perhaps my most striking point would be that Flash isn't just a piece of video playback middleware replaceable by HTML 5: it's also a myriad of artworks, interactive animations and games, that are part of our web cultural heritage. For those, SWF isn't a fungible player module or even a container file format like many others, it's a content format that can't be replaced. And just because the end of life was reached, it doesn't mean all this collective archive of SWF artworks was suddenly erased from our disks and servers. Moreover, the end of life only means Adobe Flash has reached its final version: Adobe themselves officially support several ways to continue using Flash after the end of life. One is through configuration settings for the Flash plugin, as documented in their administration guide, chapter 4, "Administration": https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/flashplayer/articles/flash_player_admin_guide/pdf/latest/flash_player_32_0_admin_guide.pdf#page=33 Another way is their standalone Flash player application, which I hear, unlike the Flash plugin, was not affected by the end of life time bomb: https://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/debug_downloads.html They also direct to an official enterprise partner who will keep offering commercial support solutions: https://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/enterprise-end-of-life.html And those are only official options to keep using Adobe Flash. I've also heard of binary hacks; alternative, open source implementations of SWF, independent of Adobe, with presumed ongoing support past Adobe's EOL; Flash video games websites distributing their own standalone player solutions... All these options are out there because people want them and use them. And, although it's not hard to locally fix, removing Flash from media-types hinders the ability to open and play local copies of, or again serve from a web server, those existing SWF artwork files. And as I said, those files aren't going anywhere, and I think SWF is going to continue being a historical file format of significance. And again, I don't know what the inclusion criteria are for this package, but this sounds like a good reason to me. Well, I guess, some people would like to disagree that those SWF artworks aren't going anywhere, and think that instead they should go into the trash. As I put it in another bug report, after TV came out, we didn't burn all books, nor did we argue that if they were still relevant, someone would have made a movie version of them; so that's ridiculous to me. Thanks for your consideration on this topic, -- Pierre Ynard -- System Information: Debian Release: bullseye/sid APT prefers unstable APT policy: (500, 'unstable') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Locale: LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=fr_FR.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE not set Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Init: sysvinit (via /sbin/init) -- no debconf information
