On 6/16/07, Joseph Neal <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Piping in as a user, I can say this has caused me a bit of confusion on more than one occasion. Given that there are versions of the same packages which are alternately hosted by debian-multimedia.org and maintained by Christian Marillat and hosted by debian.org and maintained by debian-multimedia, I imagine I'm not the only one who is never sure which version of ffmpeg is installed. If debian-multimedia.org is supposed to be an unofficial mirror, the fact that it shares a name with the debian team maintaining the official multimedia packages is also likely a cause for confusion.
The debian-multimedia.org and debian.org multimedia packages are separate, just like debian.org and all the other repositories listed on apt-get.org. To find out what the differences are one has to manually compare the source packages. In the case of ffmpeg I believe the main difference is that Debian strips some non-free and patent-encumbered code. Also the two packages have different update frequencies. This points out a problem Debian has which Ubuntu has solved; we need to acknowledge that we cannot be 'upstream' for every package in the distribution. It is perhaps a noble goal, but it isn't terribly practical. There are many sources of debs out there and it might be good for Debian to pull packaging from external sources, such as packaging on individual upstream download pages and the various repositories set up by enthusiastic packagers out there on the net. An interesting experiment would be to employ merge-o-matic (IIRC that is what Ubuntu uses to merge from Debian) in combination with manual review by developers. Please issue any followups to this point to the utnubu-discussion list for now. -- bye, pabs http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
