Re-establishing FFmpeg package naming consistency and transition woes

[Reinhard Tartler]

(copying the pkg-multimedia-maintainers list. This effectively blocks
the next upload of ffmpeg.)

Hey folks,

as some of you might now, I'm taking care of the ffmpeg packages in
Debian and ubuntu. With the outcome of the Ubuntu Patent Policy and
consultations with the Technical Board, I'd like to change package name
for better clarity.

 - the source package 'ffmpeg-debian' will be renamed back to 'ffmpeg'

The reason for introducing the 'ffmpeg-debian' name was that in debian
we were required to disable ("strip off") some encoders from the source.
Since this results in a non-pristine version of ffmpeg the package name
indicated this fact in order to avoid confusing or annoying FFmpeg
upstream.

Now that the TB clarified that the stripping of the source is not
necessary, there is no need to do so, and we revert that change as
well. This means that we have 2 source package in ubuntu with
differently named but otherwise identical sources (and therefore patches).

 - the source package 'ffmpeg' will be renamed to 'ffmpeg-extra'

This is the source package in multiverse. This is only done so that it
can build-depend on other, potentially non-free or otherwise restricted
packages like lame. According to the TB ruling, I think that most of
these package can and should be promoted to universe, but this requires
further investigation I currently don't have time to do.

The '-extra' suffix of the source package name indicates that it is an
'add-on' package with additional functionality

 - the binary packages 'libav*-unstripped-*'
    will be renamed to 'libav*-extra-*'

Formerly, the main purpose of the 'unstripped' variants was to get the
disabled encoders back. Now that we don't need to disable encoders in
the source, this is no longer the main reason. Here again, the -extra-
tag indicates that these binary packages contain additional
functionality,  due to the fact that the source was built with
additional source packages.

 - the -unstripped- packages are kept for transitional purposes

As done with other transitions, the -unstripped- packages are kept as
empty packages that depend on their -extra- counterparts.

== Transition woes ==

I've prepared test packages debian at

 http://people.debian.org/~siretart/debian/unstable/

and for for karmic in my ppa at

  https://launchpad.net/~siretart/+archive/ppa


I'd like to upload these packages to karmic ASAP to catch feature
freeze. However, I've encountered transition problems with that. While
there is an valid solution for this problem:

  apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras vlc

apt just fails to find it. aptitude doesn't find the correct solution in
the first place, but the interactive solver finds it with 2 or 3
additional tries.

I think this is because applications currently depend on the
-unstripped- variant causing additional packages to be installed, which
gets penalized by the dependency resolver. However, I'd like to hear
comments from our dependency experts about this issue.

So, please fire up your karmic VM and give these packages a try!


-- 
Gruesse/greetings,
Reinhard Tartler, KeyID 945348A4