[Spice-devel] Bug#603699: ITP: celt051 -- The CELT codec v0.5.1

[Liang Guo]

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On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 5:11 AM, Adrian Knoth <adi at drcomp.erfurt.thur.de> wrote:
> Ok, you'll lose backward compatibility to non-celt-0.9 installations
> already deployed and not being able to update... but who's using them?
> And who will be using them by 2011?
>
RHEL6 and fedora are using spice with celt051,  even if after several
years development, spice can use a stable version of celt(maybe 1.0),
spice may consider  backward compatible to support celt051 in the
future. so there will be plenty of spice server with celt051 support
for many years.

> If there's such a legacy user base, then I suggest to embed your private
> copy of celt-0.5.1 into the spice client source. For everyone else, it's
> the wrong signal to expect any CELT version (below 1.0) to be widely
> installed anywhere.
>
> So strictly speaking: it's possible for spice to support more than one
> celt version (as shown above) without ruining backward compatibility.
> In Debian, only provide the newest celt version. If need be, embed
> celt-0.5.1 into spice, but the other approach would be to entirely
> ignore this 0.5.1 thing.
>
> This way, there'll be support for newest celt with the fallback to raw
> audio transfer (DATA_MODE_RAW).
>
It looks like we have following options:

1 Package celt051 and spice in Debian, for spice and packaging
works, it is a good option, after spice switch to the latest version
celt and not use celt051 any more, we may remove celt051 in
Debian archive. but there will be two different celt version 0.5.1 and
the latest in Debian.

2 Embed celt051 to spice, this option will add workload and
complexity of packaging, and violate the Debian Policy 4.13[1], the
advantage is Debian have only one version of celt.

3 Patch spice to remove depends on celt0.5.1, just let spice use
only RAW codec. When connect to spice server. other spice client
connect to Debian spice server, we will get high latency, high
bandwidth consume audio. I'm not sure this option works.

4 Do nothing, wait spice to switch to latest celt, or work on spice to
switch to latest celt or at least support latest celt and celt 0.5.1, it
will be matter long long before. Within this period, Debian can only
run as a RHEV or spice-enabled qemu  Guest OS.

[1] http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-source.html#s-embeddedfiles

Thanks adn Regards,
-- 
Liang Guo
http://bluestone.cublog.cn