ffmpeg-devel move to git?

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Mar 28, 2011, at 22:29, Jon Keane wrote:

> I've looked around for this discussion and can't seem to find it –
> although I might not have looked hard enough so sorry if this has
> already been hashed out. ffmpeg has moved to git as their source
> repository, and claims their svn will not be around for forever. I
> would like to help getting moved over to a more recent branch of
> ffmpeg for the devel package if possible; but I see that git is highly
> disfavored in the documentation. What is the appropriate course of
> action?

I've not heard of this specific issue (ffmpeg-devel moving to git) being addressed here, so thanks for bringing it up.

git is not highly disfavored. Perhaps the documentation on this topic needs to be refined. What is favored is using a normal distfile -- a .tar.bz2 file or similar, prepared by the project's developers and released. A portfile will then specify that that file should be downloaded, and will include its checksums, so the user can be assured the software they are now installing matches the software the port maintainer tested when they updated the portfile. Furthermore, the distfiles are mirrored by our distfiles network to speed download times and protect against the original distfile disappearing.

If no distfiles are made available by a project, ports can fetch directly from the project's repository -- be that cvs, svn, git, hg, bzr... Doing this means we cannot verify the integrity of the files, and we have no protection against the repository disappearing, but it is an option portfile authors can use when better alternatives are not available.

ffmpeg-devel currently checks out the source via svn, presumably because distfiles were not available. If that's still the case, it would be perfectly fine to switch that to fetching via git, if that's what they've moved their repository to.

Another strategy portfile authors could use is to check out the source on their system, package it up as a tarball, and put it on our distfiles mirrors manually. This packaging has the advantages of supporting distfile checksumming and mirroring, but is an additional burden on the maintainer.