[arch-dev-public] Killing the 'codecs' package

Aaron Griffin aaronmgriffin at gmail.com
Mon Dec 17 20:44:55 EST 2007


On Dec 17, 2007 7:27 PM, Jason Chu <jason at archlinux.org> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Dec 18, 2007 at 06:42:41AM +0530, Varun Acharya wrote:
> > On 12/18/07, eliott <eliott at 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




More information about the arch-dev-public mailing list