Re: [gentoo-dev] Chromium system ffmpeg

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 6:54 AM, Alexis Ballier <aballier@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Tue, 15 Jan 2013 21:10:12 -0800
> ""Paweł Hajdan, Jr."" <phajdan.jr@gentoo.org> wrote:
>>
>> What when chromium upstream uses code more recent than latest ffmpeg
>> release and it doesn't compile against latest release?
>
> Blame them, it's stupid to break support for the latest release.
> Usually, it's quite trivial to maintain compatibility and you should
> probably lobby upstream to get this as a rule, it'd make life simpler
> for everyone. Or just patch releases not to use too bleeding-edge code
> (see mplayer for example).

While I agree in principle, that is much easier said than done.  I
think upstream is more likely to consider the concept of a linux
distro broken than their code.

The unpacked chromium distfile is 1.1G, of which 694M is third party
source-code.  The chromium team has done an excellent job of disabling
much of that, but the upstream attitude clearly is to cherry-pick
their dependencies.  This is pretty typical for Google projects from
what I've seen - ChromeOS basically is a fork of Gentoo with many
packages being fairly dated, and Android does just about everything
its own way, typically releasing third-party code into production
before any upstream packages have access to it.

Of course, we should encourage upstream to improve its practices.  I
just wouldn't count on it, so I think we need to give the chromium
team discretion on just how much patching they think they can handle.
They're obviously pretty good at it already.

Rich