On Wed, Dec 27, 2017 at 08:52:12PM +0100, Rutger Helling wrote:
> Hi Leo,
> 
> You can find the new features at:
> https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/blob/master/RELEASE_NOTES
> 
> There are two reasons for me personally why I wanted to update:
> 1. The mpv developers only support the latest release.
> 2. The initial Vulkan support, which I've got working (x86_64 only for
> now). I can't merge it yet until core-updates is merged though.
> 
> I agree having three ffmpeg versions is undesirable. However, looking
> at the release notes ("This release needs recent FFmpeg (newer than
> 3.4) due to major refactoring.") this is hopefully a one-time thing.
> 
> When stable ffmpeg is updated we can get rid of the -git version. mpv is
> the only one using the -git version and it's been very solid for me, so
> I don't foresee problems there. Replacing ffmpeg@3.4.1 entirely with
> this -git version seems too extreme a solution to me.
> 
> Hopefully that explains my rationale a bit!

Okay, let's keep this mpv and FFmpeg. I'm always eager to update to the
latest releases of C-language programs that handle untrusted input, and
it sounds like the mpv team is moving on from mpv 0.27.0.

Personally I think it's bad practice for mpv to depend on some random
commit of FFmpeg, but that is mpv's choice.

In the future, please send patches that introduce unreleased versions of
widely used libraries like FFmpeg to guix-patches for review.

The packaging guidelines say, "We usually package only the latest
version of a given free software project." [0]

I interpret "latest version" to mean the latest version released in the
way that the upstream developers typically do their releases. For
FFmpeg, this is a tarball.

Thank you very much for taking the time to explain your rationale!

[0]
https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Version-Numbers.html