That's a very valid point, but fairly easily solved by either of the two approaches I proposed (although perhaps more easily by making ffmpeg a stub port defaulting to the 4.x branch for now)
Gregorio Litenstein Goldzweig Médico Cirujano • Fono: +56 9 96343643 • E-Mail: [email protected] On 4 Oct 2025 0:28 -0300, Sergey Fedorov <[email protected]>, wrote: > A lot of ports use ffmpeg, and not all of them get updates with every major > release of ffmpeg. API is not fully compatible, so to switch all ports from > ffmpeg(4) to ffmpeg7, for example, will require a lot of effort, time and > testing. With dubious results at best: it is nowhere guaranteed that ffmpeg7+ > gonna work any better in any sense with ports written for ffmpeg4. > > Notice that FFMpeg upstream supports older releases and issues updates for > those. > > It will be fine to switch ffmpeg port to ffmpeg7 or 8, and then make ports > which need ffmpeg4 to depend on ffmpeg4. > > On Sat, Oct 4, 2025 at 3:10 AM Jim DeLaHunt <[email protected]> > wrote: > > On 2025-10-03 06:06, Gregorio Litenstein wrote: > > > What is the intended use of the different ffmpeg ports? > > > > > > Given that we currently have ffmpeg, ffmpeg-devel, ffmpeg4 (which mostly > > > mirrors ffmpeg), and also versions 6, 7 and 8 that install the libraries > > > to their own versioned folders... is the idea to be able to use them > > > side-by-side (with the exception of devel and ffmpeg)? > > > > > > Some ports, like opencv4 have path dependencies on libraries being in the > > > default old path, which por example mean that building opencv4 will pull > > > ffmpeg, even though there are 3 major version updates available. > > > > > > I made an issue for this (https://trac.macports.org/ticket/70729) over a > > > year ago and it's mostly been ignored. > > > > > > How should we proceed? I can see two ways forward: > > > > > > > > > 1. Mimic what the boost ports are doing, and turn ffmpeg into a stub port > > > that pulls in one of the others. > > > 2. Add +ffmpeg{version} variants to opencv4 and whichever other ports > > > might have a similar behavior (I don't know if there's any) > > > > > > > > > Could I maybe get the maintainers for these ports to weigh in? > > > > > I second the request for the maintainers of these ports to weigh in. I > > asked a similar question a few weeks ago[1], and got no answer. > > Best regards, > > —Jim DeLaHunt > > [1] email thread "What is up with ffmpeg\* ?" > > <https://lists.macports.org/pipermail/macports-users/2025-September/053833.html> > > > > -- > > . --Jim DeLaHunt, Vancouver, Canada
