[mythtv] AC3 playback mangled until timestretch activated

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Mar 01, 2010 at 08:50:24PM +0000, Stuart Morgan wrote:
> When you have to maintain said application, dealing with ever changing APIs 
> and the hundreds of support requests for bugs and behaviour changes which are 
> present in some versions of a lib but not others, then you get to make the 
> decisions. 

I guess mythtv must be using some badly designed libraries then, if the
API keeps changing in ways that break things.  Lots of libraries don't
have this problem, in fact I would say the vast majority.

So which libraries are causing these problems?

> Users expect mythtv to be stable, for it to compete against proprietary 
> applications and DVRs which get to not only determine the libs they use but 
> the hardware too. #7796 is a perfect example of what can go wrong when users 
> don't use the libs we include, everyone suffers, we have to deal with the 
> tickets it generates even though it's not our problem and the users have a 
> broken system. It's not even as though those libs add tens of MBs to the 
> download, the suggestion that including them results in bloat is ridiculous.

It may not amount to much diskspace, but it does mean yet another copy
of a lib to maintain if something needs fixing.

> The choice made by Christian is unpopular with the devs and it's even been 
> suggested that we force the Debian port to change names ala IceWeasel/FireFox 
> because we don't have the time to deal with breakages introduced by packagers 
> who think they know better.

Well Debian does have a policy of not allowing staticly linked
applications except in exceptional cases (like staticly linked recovery
shell and such).  Christian is simply trying to package mythtv to the
high standards Debian expects.  Perhaps mythtv (or more likely some of
its libraries) just isn't ready to be held to that high of a standard yet.
Hopefully this is fixable.

-- 
Len Sorensen