[Mageia-dev] Repository question: where do we put non-free+tainted RPMs?

[Michael Scherer]

Le mardi 15 mars 2011 à 16:13 +0100, Tux99 a écrit :
> 
> Quote: Michael Scherer wrote on Tue, 15 March 2011 11:28
> 
> > > amrnb-7.0.0.2-2plf2011.0.src.rpm
> > > amrwb-7.0.0.3-2plf2011.0.src.rpm
> > 
> > This one is interesting, because the whole code is free in the
> > tarball,
> > as this download the code from the internet at compile time. The
> > resulting code is IMHO non-free. 
> 
> If you look closer you will find that the source rpm actually contains the
> zip file with the code that is supposed to be downloaded. It also contains
> a .doc that apparently is not distributable.

Then that's a bug that should be reported, as I said. 

> > I would suggest to drop it and to use
> > http://sourceforge.net/projects/opencore-amr/ ,
> > which is more cleanly licensed ( Apache license ). 
> 
> Is opencore-amr a drop-in replacement for amrnb/amrwb for ALL packages that
> depend on it?
> A quick google search didn't turn up a lot, only that apparently gstreamer
> and ffmpeg can make use of opencore-amr.
> 
> Is the audio quality comparable?

I do not think the audio quality is what matter for the usage of AMR.
People that want a good audio quality will not take this codec as this
is sampled at 8kHz, and it is basically unused outside of phones,
patented, costly and standardized by 3GPP.

For the only uses I can see for the codec, aka reading voice recorded
file from a phone, anything would work. And for people that want to
record ringtones, if the phone only support AMR, again, the quality is
not a issue, because that's likely a old phone with crappy speakers.

> I couldn't find any indication of that, but gstreamer has put opencore-amr
> into the ugly plugins, rather than bad where amrnb/amrwb are, I don't know
> if that's an indication of worse quality.

The wikipedia page of gstreamer
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GStreamer ) explain everything you want
to know :

"This package contains plug-ins from the "ugly" set, a set of
good-quality plug-ins that might pose distribution problems.[14]"

So that's likely the contrary.

> With regards to facc there is no equivalent replacement for it and it's
> used by by a few projects so definitely can't be dropped.

Almost anything can be dropped.

I am not sure that the mix of LGPL and the specific license found in the
tarball is legit, and so I think we should drop it until things are
clearer.

Faac is just the encoder part. Sure, this will annoy some people, but we
are not the one asking for money to be able to use a product, nor the
one restricting others. 

If the mix is legit, then we just move to non-free, and warn mirrors
that both non-free and tainted can cause troubles.

> Also while the faac license is non-free, it's not a problem to distribute
> it, so the only problem we have is to decide where to put it (keeping in
> mind where packages that depend on it will go too).

If this is non-free, it goes to non-free, that's all. And we link
nothing to it outside of non-free. 

-- 
Michael Scherer