[Mageia-dev] [RFC] Moving various packages/codecs to tainted

[Anssi Hannula]

On 10.01.2012 05:20, Anssi Hannula wrote:
> Linux Mint provides a "No codecs" CD:
> http://www.linuxmint.com/download.php
> 
> Ubuntu has a patent policy (which basically IIRC says "rights owner or
> packager, please contact us if you think there is an infringement, we
> will investgate"):
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PatentPolicy
> 
> Note also that the Ubuntu Live CD and therefore the default Ubuntu
> installation do not contain any codecs. By default Totem is installed,
> however, and gstreamer is plugged into "gnome-codec-install" (which
> seems really nice, do we use it?), so that wen you try to play an
> unsupported video the first time, it will prompt to install the codecs
> (it will also show a warning dialog about patents etc, but AFAICS this
> comes from gnome-codec-install itself, not Ubuntu).

Well, gnome-codec-install is apt-specific, but it should be relatively
easy to adapt it or use some other similar program (not codeina).

I'll try to look at it when I can.

What is left is to figure out how would this specifically work then:

- Tainted by default, yes/no?
- Option in the installer, yes/no?
- How should the codec installer tool handle tainted-disabled case:
  a) Can install the codec from the disabled repo (with a warning)
  b) Asks the user if tainted should be enabled
  c) Error out, asking the user to enable tainted
  d) No handling, standard "codec not found" error
  (note: a,b,c require some way for the tool to know what codecs exist
   in tainted - for that we need one of:
      x) search tainted repo automatically, like rpmdrake for backports
      y) as (x) but ask user first ("do you want to search in foobar")
      z) list of tainted codecs, e.g. in an pcitable-like
         semi-automatically maintained file, or in website
  )
- What is the proper way for the user to update his packages to tainted
  versions - rpmdrake only considers updates from the /updates
  repositories, so the user would get the fully enabled version of
  package X only when an update is provided for it?
  (I'm talking about GUI, "urpmi --auto-update" works in a terminal)


> If the user installs a video player depending on ffmpeg, e.g. VLC via
> the software center, the codecs in ffmpeg will be pulled "normally",
> i.e. silently.
> 
> Linux Mint had also gstreamer plugged to gnome-codec-install, so the
> codecs will be installed if the user tries to play such a video with
> totem (again with warnings).
> 


-- 
Anssi Hannula