On Tue, 6 Mar 2012, Jonas Smedegaard <d...@jones.dk> wrote: > > In other words, if not for Christian Marillat's work, your customer > > would either be unable to do this on Debian, or, assuming enough > > technical knowledge, have to beat upstream packages into working. > > ...or use another source which plays nicer with Debian, e.g. > backports.debian.org.
I don't believe that backports.debian.org attempts to solve any of the problems that debian-multimedia solves. In the past I've used Christian's packages for playing video files produced by a mobile phone with file extension .3gp and for writing mp4 files. At the time the official Debian packages didn't support such things. I haven't recently tried either of those operations on systems without Christian's packages installed so I don't know if things have changed. I have not experienced any serious problems with Christian's repository in terms of upgrading systems either. I'm glad that Christian does this, I know some people who would be buying Windows systems if I didn't make their Linux systems do things that Christian's packages support but which aren't supported by official packages. I'm also glad that the people responsible for such decisions in Debian have decided to take a hard line against patent infringing software - last time I checked the Fedora people weren't as stringent which is a bad thing IMHO. I think it's good to encourage people to use the more free software even if they are in a jurisdiction that doesn't support software patents and then give them an option if they really want to do otherwise. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/201203061133.27469.russ...@coker.com.au
