Hi all, Debian had been shipping for some time a package named "libmp4ff" that was providing headers and shared library for the mp4 functions found in faad2's source code.
In Oct. 2009, this package was dropped because they had an answer from faad's developers that they do not recommend using this code and would not ship it as a shared library. -- Details about this here: http://bugs.debian.org/550679 We had developed an ocaml-binding for faad that included a mp4 support using this code. At first I though I would use another library but I quickly realized that the other alternatives (libmp4v2 and ffmpeg) where impractical, for license and size means. I then considered including mp4ff's code in the source and ship it. I do not like this idea because of the mess this creates with security fixes, but I also consider the mp4 functionality is quite important. Before doing do, I wondered if any other project was shipping this code already. And the answer was quite surprising. Using this website: http://www.koders.com/default.aspx?s=mp4ff.h I found out *many* projects that ship their own copy of mp4ff, mostly to provide light-weight mp4 support, just as we would like. The list comprises: * xmms2 * mpd * MoreAmp * Jubler subtitle editor * Audacious plugins * wxmusik Among these programs, some are already packaged in debian. I understand and totally respect the developer's choice to not provide some code as shared library. Maintaining API, soname and soversion, making sure of consistency between version etc.. is lot of time. However, it seems that many people, including me and those projects, perceive mp4ff has providing an important service, namely a simple support for mp4 that works really good and has a nice license. Additionally, for the Debian packagers in particular, not having this code shipped has shared object causes a serious threat to the future. If a security issue was to be found in the code later, then *all* packages shipping and compiling with this file would need to be patched and uploaded. I know that this is not faad's developers concern but at least this is an important one for the Debian packagers. For these reasons, I wanted to send you a request to kindly re-consider including mp4ff as a shared library in the future releases of faad2. I really believe this would be a great contribution for everyone that is interested in AAC and MP4 support in their software and, therefore, to their users as well. Kind regards, Romain ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.net email is sponsored by Make an app they can't live without Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge http://p.sf.net/sfu/RIM-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Savonet-devl mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/savonet-devl
