[mythtv-users] Trademark Issue with "Packages - MythTV Official Wiki" and the repository is questionable for Debian users

[Michael T. Dean]

On 11/06/2014 03:01 AM, Nick Rout wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 6, 2014 at 3:49 PM, Chuck Peters wrote:
>> I am looking into running a MythTV frontend on Debian's stable release
>> wheezy with the backend running Mythbuntu's .27 fixes branch from the
>> Launchpad PPA.  I'm still looking into how I might do that and
>> unfortunately I have more questions like Why isn't MythTV in the
>> official Debian archives yet and what do we need to do you get them
>> there...  I would think it wouldn't be too much work to use the
>> Mythbuntu packages in Debian, but then we would have other trademark
>> issues that require a license from Canonical...  Hopefully we can see
>> some official Debian MythTV packages by christmas, does anyone want to
>> help?
> As far as I know, debian does not allow packages that compile an
> internal version of an external library. Mythtv imports ffmpeg

As do MPlayer and xine, both of which are hosted by Debian.  (See 
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/578311#578311 .)

>   and
> then patches it extensively,

No, not really.  AIUI, there are almost no differences, now, compared to 
upstream.

>   and compiles with the internal version of
> ffmpeg.

And so do Mplayer/xine.  That said, it's possible that Debian packagers 
hack the MPlayer/xine build tools such that they use the 
system-installed version of ffmpeg instead of the one distributed with 
MPlayer/xine (meaning they don't use the version for which MPlayer/xine 
are designed and tested).  If they did that with MythTV, we wouldn't be 
happy--as we got a lot of bugs reported against MythTV that were due to 
use of a misconfigured/incorrectly-compiled-for-use-with-MythTV ffmpeg 
library when deb-multimedia shipped packages that they modified to run 
against the system libraries.  (So their attempt at saving a few 
megabytes on the hard drive/package size ended up costing us a /lot/ of 
hours of debugging work to find out that the only brokenness was in 
their packaging.)

Mike