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

Sun Jan 15 06:06:06 CET 2012

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
+