On Dec 17, 2007 7:27 PM, Jason Chu <jason@archlinux.org> wrote:
On Tue, Dec 18, 2007 at 06:42:41AM +0530, Varun Acharya wrote:
On 12/18/07, eliott <eliott@cactuswax.net> wrote:
I think putting it in unsupported would be fine. If some people (end users) decide they really must have it, then more power to them to maintain it in the aur (with a note to not have it taken into community). At that point it would just be a pkgbuild anyway.
Somehow, this doesn't seem very future proof. When a new codec arrives, it will take some time for VLC/ffmpeg/xine guys to come out with the open source equivalent (for example, the amount of time it took to get .rmvb support) after all the reverse engineering and voodoo magic they do. What if this new codec becomes really popular, really fast? Somehow, it doesn't seem practical to direct users to AUR to get the codecs. I propose instead renaming 'codecs' to 'codecs-nonfree' or something similar, and shipped along with the post_install or post_upgrade message we had discussed earlier.
Thanks,
Varun
(Please don't make your first line part of the last response)
I disagree that this is a problem. When we hit this situation, we can talk about changing it.
I have to side with Jason here. The "look how long it took last time" defense is a bit silly to me. It's a crappy package which isn't even JUST licensed non-free, some of it is questionably LEGAL at all. For instance, the wm*.dll codecs in there have odd redistribution rules, and IIRC correctly, you need to fill out one of these: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/licensing/agreements.aspx to redistribute these in binary format. It'd also be worthwhile to take a peek at the quicktime redistribution rules. If you ask me, the hoops we'd have to jump through here to be technically legal are far worse than Ion3, and there seemed to be no contest to killing that off