Sunday 18 September 2022

Re: +1 Maintenance Report

On Fri, 2022-09-16 at 18:12 -0600, Dan Bungert wrote:
> ##### qtav / matrix-mirage (LP: #1989613) #####
>
> "QtAV is no longer maintained" per
> https://github.com/wang-bin/QtAV/blob/master/.github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE#L19
>
> It does have a reverse dependency from matrix-mirage, which itself
> pseudo-unmaintained.  Also, these packages are either Orphaned in
> Debian or on
> their way.
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1004628#16
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1013409
>
> Please see the LP for a longer form answer, but I believe that
> removal is the
> right choice.

qtav was a dependency of digikam (another high-profile application),
which now FTBFS/dep-waits due to this removal. I had been keeping this
one alive with 8.0.0 git snapshots which kept its ffmpeg 5
compatibility (as the 7.x series was ffmpeg5 was incompatible), but
without qtav this surely kills digikam, which means all that work I had
put into it was all for naught.

I am severely disappointed in this, because now Ubuntu Studio users are
very likely without their primary photo organization software, and I'm
running out of time and options. I initially had two proposals that
worked with ffmpeg 5 to keep it in the archive:

* Use the 7.x (stable), disable a/v capabilities and keep it in the
archive, or
* Switch to the master branch of 8.0 and use git snapshots to keep it
compatible with ffmpeg5.

Discussions between Steve Langasek, Rik Mills, and myself went with the
latter option. However, with the removal of qtav, that option has
disappeared. Right now, my last upload is in dep-wait status, and an
attempt to rebuild FTBFS without libqtav-dev.

Attempts to build with the the a/v capablitites disabled have proved
fruitless as well. It appears that qtav was a hard dependency here. If
I report this to the upstream developers of digikam, all I'm going to
hear is, "You should never have moved away from ffmpeg 4 in the first
place."

Moving to the snap of digikam isn't an option either as it's maintained
directly by KDE, so this isn't a situation where I can contact them to
have a "stable/ubuntu-22.10" track opened, and who knows what other
snap components need to be included.

I think we can all agree this ffmpeg 5 transition has been a train
wreck. So far, with audacity and digikam, we are losing two high-
profile applications, and both very late in the cycle.

--
Erich Eickmeyer
Project Leader - Ubuntu Studio
Member - Ubuntu Community Council