On Fri, Sep 19, 2008 at 02:56:25PM +0200, Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski wrote:
On Friday, 19 September 2008 at 09:34, Axel Thimm wrote:
On Fri, Sep 19, 2008 at 01:41:50AM +1200, Nigel Jones wrote:
So I know we have http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Guidelines#Duplication_of_system_lib... which I think is pretty good, easy to understand and fairly simple.
The problem I think is that some upstream's still want to ship internal, modified libraries.
Upstream says "it's a guideline not a rule".
_MY_ question is, what can we (Fedora) do to make it clear that we have clear cut rules for why we don't want packages providing internal libraries?
[...]
Just to quote one such example: ffmpeg is a fast moving target, and any project depending on the lib API is cutting a checkout, patching it a up and using it for its own purposes. Replacing these internal ffmpegs with a system ffmpeg is a nightmare or even impossible w/o rewriting the app interface to it. Given that ffmpeg and friends fall under the patent forbidden class we don't see that directly in Fedora, but this issue is still out there.
I don't know if you've been following FFmpeg development lately, but they have improved over the last year or so to the point that no ABI breakage occurs
Note I mentioned the API, which is still changing on a regular basis. For ffmpeg it doesn't actually help that there are no releases ever either.
without bumping the major version of the affected library. The pkg-config support is put properly in place, too, so if you haven't done that already, it's high time to begin convincing depdendent projects to start supporting shared FFmpeg. I've already begun working on fixing the main consumer of FFmpeg, MPlayer, to do that.
Unless ffmpeg actually releases anything again I doubt that too many projects will try to depend on an external shared lib whose API stability window is a few weeks.
This is not a criticism against the very nice work of the ffmpeg people. They just need the freedom of a non stable API for being able to develop as fast and take into account that projects need to cut a snapshot (actually they enforce this explicitely).