On 12-03-06 at 11:33am, Russell Coker wrote: > On Tue, 6 Mar 2012, Jonas Smedegaard <d...@jones.dk> wrote: > > > In other words, if not for Christian Marillat's work, your > > > customer would either be unable to do this on Debian, or, assuming > > > enough technical knowledge, have to beat upstream packages into > > > working. > > > > ...or use another source which plays nicer with Debian, e.g. > > backports.debian.org. > > I don't believe that backports.debian.org attempts to solve any of the > problems that debian-multimedia solves. In the past I've used > Christian's packages for playing video files produced by a mobile > phone with file extension .3gp and for writing mp4 files. At the time > the official Debian packages didn't support such things. I haven't > recently tried either of those operations on systems without > Christian's packages installed so I don't know if things have changed.
That's exactly my point: Things have changed - believe it or not. :-) > I have not experienced any serious problems with Christian's > repository in terms of upgrading systems either. > > I'm glad that Christian does this, I know some people who would be > buying Windows systems if I didn't make their Linux systems do things > that Christian's packages support but which aren't supported by > official packages. I am also glad for what Christian have done. I have have good use of some of his packages. But they do cause real problems, and I believe they are (with libdvdcss2 as a possible exception) no longer the best option as a) unstable has improved radically, and b) I guess the improved packages are available at backports.debian.org. I don't actually know for sure if they are available: Personally I only use unofficial packages that I compile myself - be it backported from Debian testing or unstable or sideports from d-m.o or other sources. > I'm also glad that the people responsible for such decisions in Debian > have decided to take a hard line against patent infringing software - > last time I checked the Fedora people weren't as stringent which is a > bad thing IMHO. I think it's good to encourage people to use the more > free software even if they are in a jurisdiction that doesn't support > software patents and then give them an option if they really want to > do otherwise. Debian now has a *changed* hard line against patent infringing software - resulting in more codecs supported in official Debian packages. - Jonas -- * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt * Tlf.: +45 40843136 Website: http://dr.jones.dk/ [x] quote me freely [ ] ask before reusing [ ] keep private
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature
