#1086805 ffmpeg: please provide versionless libav* that pull the latest versioned binaries

Package:
ffmpeg
Source:
ffmpeg
Description:
Tools for transcoding, streaming and playing of multimedia files
Submitter:
Martin-Éric Racine
Date:
2025-08-13 20:47:06 UTC
Severity:
normal
Tags:
#1086805#5
Date:
2024-11-06 09:53:06 UTC
From:
To:
ffmpeg aleady ships generic libav*-extra packages that depend on the latest versions. It would be desirable to also ship non-extra versions of these.

Thanks!
Martin-Éric
#1086805#10
Date:
2024-11-06 11:50:32 UTC
From:
To:
Am 2024-11-06 10:53, schrieb Martin-Éric Racine:

Could you elaborate your use case, please? The non-extra variants of the
shared library packages are installed by default, i.e. they are first
choice in the list of alternative dependencies that shlibdeps creates.
The -extra dummy packages are there to make sure that the extra variants
of the libraries are preferred. So, what would be the use case of a
non-extra package?

  - Fabian
#1086805#15
Date:
2024-11-07 10:04:42 UTC
From:
To:
ke 6. marrask. 2024 klo 13.50 Fabian Greffrath (fabian@greffrath.com) kirjoitti:
are as follow:

Depends: libc6 (>= 2.30), libasound2, libatk-bridge2.0-0, libatomic1,
libgbm1, libglib2.0-0, libgtk-3-0, libnss3, libxshmfence1, libxss1,
libxtst6, xdg-utils, libayatana-appindicator3-1

Recommends: libavcodec58 | libavcodec-extra58 | libavcodec57 |
libavcodec-extra57 | libavcodec-ffmpeg56 | libavcodec-ffmpeg-extra56 |
libavcodec54 | libavcodec-extra-54, libavformat58 | libavformat57 |
libavformat-ffmpeg56 | libavformat54

That long Recommends would make more sense if it were:

Recommends: libavcodec | libavcodec-extra, libavformat | libavformat-extra

Replacing all the *-extra with the metapackage already is possible.
Replacing the non-extra ones is not.

Martin-Éric
#1086805#20
Date:
2024-11-07 10:13:02 UTC
From:
To:
Am 2024-11-07 11:04, schrieb Martin-Éric Racine:

I see, so this is about dlopen()ed shared libraries. Thanks for the
example!

  - Fabian
#1086805#25
Date:
2025-03-11 14:46:42 UTC
From:
To:
to 7.11.2024 klo 12.13 Fabian Greffrath (fabian@greffrath.com) kirjoitti:

Welcome. Has there been any progress on this?

Martin-Éric
#1086805#30
Date:
2025-03-13 10:09:11 UTC
From:
To:
Am 2025-03-11 15:46, schrieb Martin-Éric Racine:

Nope, but I'd volunteer to work on this.

What name scheme do you suggest for the packages, libav*-nonextra or
libav*-regular or anything else?

  - Fabian
#1086805#35
Date:
2025-03-13 10:58:09 UTC
From:
To:
Please don't. I don't think that we should support this use case in the
archive. If a package supports dlopening multiple versions of libav
libraries, then that can and should be expressed in their Depends to
make it clear which version that they support. On a different note, the
dependencies of the spotify package are unnecessarily complex since none
of the -extra variants are needed to be listed there.

The -extra meta package is there to help users to get the
-extra variants where they exist. But 

Cheers
#1086805#40
Date:
2025-03-13 11:11:28 UTC
From:
To:
Am 2025-03-13 11:58, schrieb Sebastian Ramacher:

Hmkay.

Now it got interesting... ;)

  - Fabian
#1086805#45
Date:
2025-03-13 11:14:37 UTC
From:
To:
to 13.3.2025 klo 12.10 Fabian Greffrath (fabian@greffrath.com) kirjoitti:

libavcodec, libavcodec-extra, libavformat, libavformat-extra, libavutil

With each of the above depending on the matching currently available version.

Looking at what's currently in unstable these would respectly depend on:

libavcodec61, libavcodec-extra61, libavformat61, libavformat-extra61,
libavutil59

Martin-Éric
#1086805#50
Date:
2025-03-14 08:14:49 UTC
From:
To:
Am Donnerstag, dem 13.03.2025 um 11:58 +0100 schrieb Sebastian
Ramacher:

Could you reveal the second half of the last sentence, please?

 - Fabian
#1086805#55
Date:
2025-03-14 08:29:51 UTC
From:
To:
The "But" is a left over from a sentence moved elsewhere.

Cheers
#1086805#64
Date:
2025-08-12 20:36:32 UTC
From:
To:
tags 1086805 + wontfix
close 1086805
thanks
#1086805#69
Date:
2025-08-13 05:17:51 UTC
From:
To:
ti 12.8.2025 klo 23.39 Sebastian Ramacher (sramacher@debian.org) kirjoitti:

This bus was marked as wontfix and closed without any explanation.

Martin-Éric
#1086805#76
Date:
2025-08-13 06:45:02 UTC
From:
To:
ke 13.8.2025 klo 9.42 Fabian Greffrath (fabian@greffrath.com) kirjoitti:

That's not an explanation. That's a cop-out.

Martin-Éric
#1086805#81
Date:
2025-08-13 06:42:46 UTC
From:
To:
Am 2025-08-13 07:17, schrieb Martin-Éric Racine:

Sebastian provided some rationale here:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1086805#35

  - Fabian
#1086805#86
Date:
2025-08-13 20:45:19 UTC
From:
To:
Take it or leave it. Version-less binary packages create more problems
than they solve (if they solve any at all). There is a good reason we
have a whole section in the Debian policy on managing shared libaries.

I am closing this bug again.

Cheers