ffmpeg in devel: to bump or not to bump

[Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski]

On Sunday, 14 September 2008 at 16:06, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> On 14.09.2008 14:09, Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski wrote:
> >Apparently I haven't been communicating my intentions widely enough, so
> >I'll try starting a thread here for a change. ;)
> 
> Many thx for that.
> 
> >Anyway, I'm sorry to bother packagers of ffmpeg-dependent software,
> >but I'd like to upgrade to a post-20080908 snapshot in a few weeks.
> 
> I'd be interested in a more exact definition for "a few weeks".

I don't know, really. I was going to watch the FFmpeg development list
a bit more closely to see what is going to happen.

> Fedora has a feature freeze for a good reason and I'd say that we 
> should have one to. But I suppose a few weeks (3 to 4) before the Fedora 
> release in question is published should do the trick for most of out stuff.
> 
> But I'm wondering if especially ffmpeg should be one of the exceptions 
> for that "most" and have a *longer* freeze, as ffmpeg is a quite crucial 
> package. And not only that, it sometimes takes weeks until all the 
> maintainers got around to rebuild and/or fix their packages for changes 
> in ffmpeg. Take for example libdlna, which sill doesn't find the ffmpeg 
> headers in their new location and thus hasn't been build yet for RPM 
> Fusion because nobody did the necessary steps to make it compile with 
> current ffmpeg.

I see. You have a valid point. Admittedly the situation with ffmpeg
has improved over the last year or so, so as long as the applications
using ffmpeg have updated their interfaces in the last few months,
there should be less and less breakage in the future.

I'll take a look at libdlna if I can spare some time later.

> >ffmpeg SVN r15262 introduced a bump to major libavcodec version, so
> >all dependent packages will need a rebuild. The last time this has
> >happened was in r4726, over 2 and a half years ago. There are some
> >API changes going on right now so I'm not going to do it just yet.
> 
> Just to be sure: You said "need a rebuild" and "API changes" in above 
> para. Thus the apps that use ffmpeg not only need adjustments for the 
> new ffmpeg but also code changes?

Possibly. Now that they've broken ABI, all kinds of changes can be
expected. On second thought maybe I'll wait until F10 is released
with this. I'll update FFmpeg to the last snapshot with the old ABI
in all branches to have a good base, but I'll wait for Fedora rawhide
fork (and the following RPMFusion devel fork) to do the ABI bump.
Does that sound okay?

Regards,
R.

-- 
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Livna http://rpm.livna.org | MPlayer http://mplayerhq.hu
"Faith manages."
        -- Delenn to Lennier in Babylon 5:"Confessions and Lamentations"