Re: [gentoo-dev] The Gentoo Qt Project wants your help!

[Alexis Ballier <aballier@gentoo.org>]

On Sat, 2 Mar 2013 14:08:28 +0100
Tom Wijsman <TomWij@gentoo.org> wrote:

> On Sat, 2 Mar 2013 14:54:22 +0800
> Ben de Groot <yngwin@gentoo.org> wrote:
> 
> > media-video/avidemux (bundled libs)
> 
> I like this application, but am not so sure about maintaining this...
> =/
> 
> Would it be reasonable to create a new package avidemux-ffmpeg in
> which we create a version of ffmpeg with their patches applied?
> Perhaps we can also remove the parts of ffmpeg that aren't used by
> avidemux to keep the overhead of having ffmpeg twice on the system
> low.
> 
> I don't see any other reliable solution, unless upstream is willing to
> stop bundling ffmpeg and get their patches incorporated on that.
> But upon reading the progress on Debian, there is barely any progress
> on that as far as I am aware of; and I'm not willing to maintain a
> package that has 1) an unpatched ffmpeg that breaks it for people or
> 2) a bundled ffmpeg that keeps it from getting unmasked /
> reliable / ...
> 
> The other approach is for someone to attempt to try to get all these
> patches upstream, but some of them are undocumented which makes it
> hard to understand what the changes actually are done for; and at
> this point in time it is not guaranteed that ffmpeg would take these
> patches.
> 
> So, what is the Qt herd's opinion on creating a avidemux-ffmpeg
> package?

In the end if you dump their ffmpeg version and use it only for
avidemux, the end result is the same as bundling it.

If you want to do things correctly, you'd try to get the patches merged
upstream. Maybe some are not even necessary these days.

First you'd need to have an option to use system ffmpeg. Then you could
work on porting patches.

That is what xbmc is doing: they have a bundled copy with a couple of
patches they try to get merged upstream (mainly windows patches btw)
but allow using system version. That way it is easier to work on fixing
bugs rather than trusting avidemux for adding random undocumented
fixes...