Idea for expanded support of some non-free software

[Cef]

On Fri, 10 Dec 2004 10:31, Petri Pennanen wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-12-09 at 15:45 -0500, thully at umich.edu wrote:
> > At this point, I'm mostly just requesting that Ubuntu try to ensure that
> > these packages work well - and I see this not happening in the case of
> > Flash, with the sound server issue.  The same version of Flash (7.0.25)
> > worked fine with Warty, but a change in Hoary broke Flash's sound (note
> > that Flash is the same version, only free packages were updated).
> >
> > Because this is not the fault of Flash but Gnome's sound server, it seems
> > like this is a reasonable issue to investigate.  Desktop users will
> > expect that if they go to a web page in Firefox and install Flash when
> > prompted, sound will work - and if it doesn't, it seems like it should be
> > considered a bug in Ubuntu.
>
> It does make some sense to work on a fix if the issue if a bug has been
> introduced in the sound server. However it's quite possible that the
> flash binary and the codweawer package are compiled against an older
> library and that small changes in Hoary has caused this breakage. That
> would mean the problem only can be be fixed by Macromedia/Codeweavers
> (and that it's likely to happen before Hoary is released).

I suppose the real question to be asked at this point is:
 If there is a change to the library semantics that Flash (et al.) uses, is 
this an upstream change, or Ubuntu specific? If it's specific to Ubuntu, you 
can probably (rightly) assume that Macromedia (et al.) won't do much to fix 
it. If it's a necessary change, and it can be pushed upstream, then it's not 
Ubuntu's problem anymore. Once it's in upstream source, it's the 
responsibility of Macromedia (et al.) to make their apps work with the 
libraries, as everyone else out there (Redhat, Mandrake, SuSE, Novell, 
Debian, etc) will be using the same upstream source, and encounter the same 
issues till Macromedia (et al.) fixes the problem.

-- 
 Stuart Young - aka Cefiar - cef at optus.net