Ubuntu renaming FFmpeg to libav

[Mark Shuttleworth]

Hi Michael

Thanks for raising this with us. I've copied the Technical Board as I
think they are the right body to take a position on the matter. They
will certainly want to hear frmo those behind libav as well.

Mark


On 07/04/11 18:55, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> Hi Mark
>
> Iam the main developer (and leader if you want) of FFmpeg.
>
> Iam writing this a bit hastily as i just found out a technical board
> meeting takes place 18UTC today ...
> 3 month ago FFmpeg was forked by a small group of active ffmpeg
> developers. That was done extreemly hostily by the root admins of our
> server. And forced us to find a new server and hosting and point
> ffmpeg.org there as all attempts to negotiate failed and we where
> completely locked out of the webpage and source repository.
> Next they shut down our mailing lists and withhold the subscriber lists
> from us forcing us to restore them from a recent backup onto the new
> server. We also where threatened with lawyers due to alleged rights on
> the ffmpeg logo, both its idea and actual drawing of the current one i
> have done myself.
>
> But these matters are of course our internal problem, i just mentioned
> them as i cant get it out of my head that my friends did this.
> Whats not just our internal problem is that one of the members of the
> libav fork is maintaining the debian & ubuntu packages of ffmpeg. And it
> seems these were renamed to libav.
> I and several other FFmpeg developers have of course contacted
> reinhard(ubuntu ffmpeg package maintainer) but he only awnsered
> yesterday that his decission of not packaging FFmpeg but the fork he is
> a member of is final.
> The source code difference between the last releases of FFmpeg and libav
> (0.6.2) is that FFMpeg has one tiny additional bugfix and that the text
> string FFmpeg is replaced by libav in libav 0.6.2
>
> The commits since the fork in trunk differs like this:
> git log --oneline 111ccca602e96f18d4fab1117b2b768ae51814f7..libav/master
> |cut -d' ' -f 2- |sort |uniq |wc
>     785    5234   38369
> michael at blackbox:~/ffmpeg-git/ffmpeg$ git log --oneline
> 111ccca602e96f18d4fab1117b2b768ae51814f7..master |cut -d' ' -f 2- |sort
> |uniq |wc
>    1115    8298   62166
>
> That is FFmpeg has many more commits than libav.
> We also merge back all changes from libav daily which is why the
> uniq/sort is needed to filter duplicates out, otherwise we would have
> more than 2 times as many commits as libav, as they do not merge most of
> our changes into their tree.
>
> In terms of features, FFmpeg has 3 times as many video filters and many
> more bugfixes just to name 2 differences.
>
> I thus belive that it is not in the interrest of the ubuntu users if
> ubuntu switches from FFmpeg to libav
>
> best regards
> Michael
> (i would gpg sign this but sending this through launchpad due to not
> knowing your email makes this hard)