[short answer, I'm on the run] On Thu, Jun 4, 2015 at 6:28 PM, Andreas Cadhalpun <[email protected]> wrote:
>>> I had considered producing optimized flavors, but I came to the conclusion >>> that it would complicate debian/rules without much benefit, because >>> the flavors are mostly unnecessary: >> >> That's not only because of optimization, but also for licensing >> issues: The lib*-extra-* packages are licensed with GPLv3+, which is >> not acceptable for the majority of applications in debian. >> >> Note that it does not matter whether or not there are GPLv3+ >> applications in the archive. These -extra- package do provide >> additional functionality that users do appreciate. However, we cannot >> provide that in the "standard" libav* packages because we do have >> GPLv2-only applications that we must not link against a GPLv3 >> libavcodec. > > The current implementation of the extra flavor doesn't prevent using it > with a GPLv2-only program and thus is effectively nearly as bad as just > enabling the GPLv3 code in the standard build. The keyword in this sentence is "using". I do NOT think we need to prevent users from doing stupid things, but we must ensure that Debian as a (re-)distributor does not violate any licenses. The dependencies are set up in a way that ensures that all packages build against the GPLv2+ variants, and nowhere on the buildds or on any other Debian machine we distribute a piece of software that would be in violation here. And that was the point of this exercise. > Adding a mechanism to prevent this would make the extra flavor even > more complex. I don't think this is necessary. I doubt that many users would find such a check actually helpful. > As you can see from above numbers, even in the uttermost worst case, > that is if both Michael and the Libav developers stopped working on > the codebase, FFmpeg would still have more commits than Libav > currently does. Comparing an individual developer with a development team seems inappropriate to me. Also, the chosen development processes of both projects significantly affect the rate of commits. That comparison does not appear useful. Reinhard _______________________________________________ pkg-multimedia-maintainers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pkg-multimedia-maintainers
