On Tue, 5 Jul 2022 10:13:20 +0200 Sebastian Ramacher <sramac...@debian.org> 
wrote:

> > > Reverse dependencies had 4 months to fix their bugs, so I'm going
> > > ahead with this one.
> > 
> > Not even close to enough time for all affected upstream teams.
> 
> The 4 months only reflects the Debian timeline. If upstreams are not
> able to track the constant changes in ffmpegs API, please propose to
> them to switch to higher level abstractions such as ffms2 or gstreamer.

Certainly one can propose.  However, one cannot really expect upstream to 
change their architecture away from ffmpeg by a given time any more than one 
can expect them to adapt to ffmeg ABI break in that time.

> > Debian has GTK3 and GTK4, Qt5 and Qt6 etc., it's not ideal and it is a
> > lot of work but it may be necessary to have libavcodec4-dev and
> > libavcodec-dev with a new source package ffmpeg4 alongside ffmpeg.
> 
> ffmpeg has a bad history of security issues including RCEs. 

That's a fair observation, and one that deserves to be taken into 
consideration.  Another observation: the ffmeg hard transition means that some 
packages will either be removed or seriously degraded -- as one example, 
digikam has lost ability to process video over this [1].

I think that overall usability of the distribution is an important 
consideration in making design choices.  Certainly one doesn't want a 
distribution riddled with security issues; nor does one want functionality 
removed.  So the question is really one of balance.  If ffmpeg 4 and 5 are both 
offered, with packages strongly encouraged to migrate: the distribution overall 
has improved security stance AND it retains more functionality.

-Steve

[1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1004769

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