The gstreamer third way

[Toshio Kuratomi]

David Nielsen wrote:
> fre, 12 10 2007 kl. 20:41 +0200, skrev Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski:
>> On Friday, 12 October 2007 at 21:54, David Nielsen wrote:
>> [...]
>>> This is a QT bug, I suggest the QT people fix it, if need be then KDE
>>> can be compiled without said support till a solution is found. Naturally
>>> it's undesirable to withhold said functionality from these users but
>>> TrollTech knew these was coming and it's a well understood problem which
>>> can only be fixed in a satifactory manner by them.
>> This problem wouldn't have arised if samba just stayed with GPLv2.
>> I cannot imagine how you can call this a QT bug.
> 
> Samba has (to the best of my knowledge) always been GPLv2+, they
> preannounced the intention to go to GPLv3+. TrollTech has had plenty of
> time to at least make an announcement on the issue to say they were
> working on it. 
> 
> It's a TrollTech problem, I have no idea how they should solve it, I
> just don't see why Fedora should do it for them by shipping an older
> version of Samba which we can only be assured is supported for serious
> bugs and security fixes for another year. Especially since the worst
> case would be that they decide to never become compliant or work around
> the issue, since that means we basically fork Samba - something I'm sure
> everyone can agree is undesirable. I'm also sure that our users missing
> out on the latest Samba work for the coming releases while TrollTech
> works on the licensing issue is also undesirable. And naturally it's
> undesirable to see KDE users without such support, which goes without
> saying - this is a matter of selecting the lesser evil which will go
> away the quickest.
> 
> It's a hard problem but I think the ball is in TrollTechs court, at
> least for a comment on whither or not they are going to solve this
> issue. If they are working on it and a solution can be expected in the
> near future then I'd agree with holding back on the Samba version is
> acceptable but I'm terrified of doing so if we don't even have a promise
> that the problem will go away.
> 
I'd much prefer to leave this in the KDE maintainers' courts.  The Samba 
maintainer has made clear his intention to move to a GPLv3 library in 
F9.  The KDE maintainers can decide how best to handle the situation 
from there.

Their options are:
1) Fork samba.  This is what happens with any package which no longer 
has an upstream but has people within Fedora who care about it 
sufficiently to deal with it.

2) Convince upstream KDE to fork samba.  It would be best if they take 
the time to make the library not conflict with the distro version of 
samba (probably by renaming.  libsamba-gpl2 was proposed earlier and 
would work.) but even if they don't we've worked around bad packaging in 
upstream tarballs before.

3) Remove samba support until the license situation allows linking to 
libsmbclient again.

4) Port kio-smb to gnome-vfs2 :-)

We can all see drawbacks with each of these options but it's really up 
to those who are going to do the kde packaging work to decide which of 
the choices is "right".

-Toshio