Proposing changes to multimedia stack

[Mario Limonciello]

The other day John Dong and I were talking on IRC about the current
situation with ffmpeg.  There are two versions of ffmpeg (and some related
applications) out there: one on our archive and one on medibuntu.  The one
on medibuntu is the same source package as the one in our archive but it is
built with encoders.

Personally I think its really unfortunate to have to do it this way.  It
seems like the exact reason that we have an area like multiverse.  Several
ffmpeg and lame based projects already live there.

John had said he thinks the plan was to eventually move ffmpeg into main, so
there wouldn't be much expectation to move it from universe to multiverse
and just turn everything on.  To this I proposed that we would modify the
source package for ffmpeg to generate binaries twice.  The free binaries
could end up in universe or main whereas the non free would end up in
multiverse.

In order to avoid confusion and the necessity of using Replaces/Conflicts, a
third virtual package binary that depends on either the free | non-free
variant can also be generated.

This same approach can then be used for the non-free amarok changes, bmp
changes, mplayer changes and xmms changes.

Before just going out there and making these drastic changes, we wanted to
get input from the rest of the MOTU team to see what the thought of this
would be.  So what do people think?

Regards,

-- 
Mario Limonciello
superm1 at gmail.com
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