As summary says in Gentoo you can finally decide which implementation of libav you want, good old ffmpeg named flavor or the new and shiny libav one.

14 months after I introduced it to main tree we finally got it stable almost everywhere (just ppc missing yet as usual :P). We did *censored* of work in order to support both implementations, introducing virtual package, proper (non-conditional) patches everywhere, etc. etc.

So why should you switch your package?

Basically it does not matter for you. We can say it can be done as personal prefference.
We can say that ffmpeg merges from libav tree and throws some experimental patches over it. Thats why my personal prefference is with libav folks as I don’t trust any idea of merging anything. Otoh the ffmpeg is the “orginal” (well most devs moved under libav) upstream thus they should get our trust for what they are doing.

Today from the distro PoV there are some distributions using libav (Debian, Sabayon) and also ffmpeg (openSUSE [external repo called packman]).

As we in Gentoo really are pro-choice just pick yourself and let us know how happy are you with such decision :-P

So how can I switch?

Just edit /etc/portage/package.use* to keep same useflag from media-video/ffmpeg to media-video/libav and run:

emerge -C ffmpeg && emerge -1v libav

After this move you need to recompile all the packages depending on ffmpeg. This can be done with little help of revdep_rebuild or by using portage-2.2 and its sets by running:

emerge @preserved-rebuild

packages that hard require media-video/ffmpeg

As reported in the first comment the mplayer1 does now strictly require ffmpeg. So I did a little check to see which packages hard-require the other implementation and here is the list:

games-arcade/performous-0.6.1 (media-video/ffmpeg)
media-libs/ffmpegsource-2.16.2.1_pre587 (>=media-video/ffmpeg-0.9)
media-libs/mediastreamer-2.3.0-r1 (video ? media-video/ffmpeg)
media-plugins/audacious-plugins-3.0.3 (ffmpeg ? >=media-video/ffmpeg-0.7.3)
media-plugins/audacious-plugins-3.1 (ffmpeg ? >=media-video/ffmpeg-0.7.3)
media-plugins/audacious-plugins-3.1.1 (ffmpeg ? >=media-video/ffmpeg-0.7.3)
media-plugins/audacious-plugins-3.2 (ffmpeg ? >=media-video/ffmpeg-0.7.3)
media-plugins/audacious-plugins-3.2.1 (ffmpeg ? >=media-video/ffmpeg-0.7.3)
media-plugins/audacious-plugins-3.2.2-r1 (ffmpeg ? >=media-video/ffmpeg-0.7.3)
media-plugins/mediastreamer-x264-1.1.7 (media-video/ffmpeg)
media-plugins/mediastreamer-x264-1.3.3 (media-video/ffmpeg)
media-video/dv2sub-0.3 (kino ? media-video/ffmpeg)
media-video/mplayer-1.0_rc4_p20120213 (>=media-video/ffmpeg-0.10)
media-video/mplayer-1.0_rc4_p20120405 (>=media-video/ffmpeg-0.10.2)
media-video/mplayer-9999 (>media-video/ffmpeg-0.10.2)
media-video/transcode-1.1.5-r2 (postproc ? media-video/ffmpeg)
net-libs/opal-2.2.11 (>=media-video/ffmpeg-0.4.7)
net-libs/opal-3.6.8 (ffmpeg ? >=media-video/ffmpeg-0.5[encode])
                    (x264 ? >=media-video/ffmpeg-0.4.7)
net-libs/opal-3.6.8-r1 (ffmpeg ? >=media-video/ffmpeg-0.5[encode])
                       (x264 ? >=media-video/ffmpeg-0.4.7)
net-libs/openh323-1.18.0 (>=media-video/ffmpeg-0.4.7)

I bet most of these could work with libav, so if you are user of such package and want to try libav just edit the dependency to be on virtual/ffmpeg instead of the media-video/ffmpeg and see if it works.

As from today we have new app-officeext category that will be holding various office extensions. You all for sure know that when I say office I mean libreoffice/openoffice extensions. This means that we can now easily add new and shiny ones if you desire so. Please open bugs for your favorite extensions and we will ship them ASAP (also prefferably open stable requests for the current ones so I don’t have to remember to do it :P).

You might be able to find some fancy extensions there already that might help you improve your workflow with libreoffice.

Here is the list I will do this afternoon as they are part of the libreoffice core we never bothered to provide yet:
google-docs ; barcode ; diagram ; hunart ; numbertext ; oooblogger ; typo ; validator ; watch-window ; ct2n (requres two patches from lo tree -> repack).

Apache Office 3.4 released

From other news there is now openoffice 3.4 release made by folks from Apache Foundation. Gentoo will not package this release as it is basically equal to what we would call libreoffice-3.4.1 with some missing features and lacking all the build fixes that were put in lo-3.4.

But by the Gentoo here I just mean that I am epically lazy to solve again all the build issues 3.3 had. So if anyone is willing to maintain and package it we will gladly add it to the main tree (with the named person as maitnainer). You don’t even have to be a developer, there is a nice proxy-maintainer project so poke me mail if you are interested.

What we could also do is to add hardmasked binary version.That stuff contains security issues and is basically the same like old libreoffice/openoffice binaries which tried to contain everything from python to icu. Also for this someone interested is required. So mail me/comment here.

Dictionaries

There will be progress when I find some more time. New simpler eclass for myspell (actually hunspell) dictionaries is in place and I just need to check and verify all the releases. For this I got nice script from Caolan McNamara (LO guy working for Redhat) that contains upstreams and versioning schemes for most of the languages.

This will also be used with utilizing the euscan tool writen by Corentin Chary to watch for newer versions. Where I will also try to bump those with compatible licensing directly in dictionaries repo of libreoffice so you will be able to enjoy the spellchecking even on fancy platforms that none sane would use (riiiight? :-P).

cups dependency

Lots of you lads whined^Wcomplained about the fact cups is actual hard dependency now in libreoffice. With help of one brave lad (Dave Flogeras) we managed to bake configure switch for cups again. It is currently under review on libreoffice mailinglist (not really it already passed and I was just lazy to commit it in which I will do this afternoon). After it is included our live ebuild will again have switch to disable printing completely.

Internal lo extensions

Libreoffice itself has some internal extensions that are built as part of the build process. In history those were never built, or always built, depending on the complexity of their deps.

This now changes. There is new LIBREOFICE_EXTENSIONS use expand variable that can be used same way like VIDEO_CARDS in make.conf.

All of the extensions are already in except reportbuilder, because I was unable to find some java packages (I mailed java team for help here so those hopefully will be identified soon).

If you are interested in contributing to libreoffice consult various comments I put in the live ebuild as I am too sexy^Wlazy to open easy hacks on freedesktop bugzilla. Any help wrt unbundling stuff is welcome. Currently there is even problem with building javascript engine interface because bundled rhino uses too patched debug interfaces (one can either remove it or make work on the currently provided one) so if you like javascript and java you can have fun.