Hi, Linux Audio Developers often have to assist users with audio and multimedia issues that are working in ffmpeg but not in libav. In addition the deprecation message for the ffmpeg wrapper causes a lot of confusion and even though it is not meant maliciously most people perceive it as an attack on FFMPEG by petty libav developers. This is neither good for the open source multimedia community as it encourages and promotes fractious behaviour but it also misleads people into thinking that FFMPEG is an abandoned project.
I have monitored the commits for both libav and ffmpeg for the past few years and I can tell you that FFMPEG has more commits than libav. It is clearly not a project that is going away anytime soon. In short FFMPEG is one of the most powerful multimedia tools that we have and it is a travesty that a couple of Debian package maintainers have been allowed to make the decision for us on which fork we are able to install. The Debian community needs to look closely at the background for this decision making process especially with a view towards the ongoing damage that the continued promotion of FFMPEG as a deprecated project is doing to global perception of Linux Multimedia as well as the confusion that has been caused to date. This is along the same lines as the purposefully bad implementation of PulseAudip that plagued Ubuntu users for a number of years. It was only solved when Mark Shuttleworth stepped in and personally fired the people responsible for the mismanaged audio system. The damage that was caused and the ongoing negative perception to Pulse Audio that still exists is taking many years to rectify. it's time that Linux Multimedia was given a higher political priority. Many of the greatest leaps forward over the past several years wouldn't have been possible without ALSA, Pulse Audio, FFMPEG and various other open source multimedia projects. Continuing to allow a substandard fork of a well loved and very active project to be promoted as the "new way" needs to stop. -- Patrick Shirkey Boost Hardware Ltd -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
