#1808 inclusion of crippled (but free?) AAC decoder
Closed 6 years ago Opened 6 years ago by rathann.

A crippled version of fdk-aac decoder has been posted for review and inclusion into Fedora:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1501522

I say crippled, because it doesn't play HE-AAC SBR reference files correctly and there's no indication that something is wrong other than the missing frequencies in the output, see https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1501522#c22 for more details.

Wim is arguing for including this version in Fedora anyway on the premise than something half-working is better than nothing at all (see https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1501522#c34), but I'm not convinced (see https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1501522#c29).

Please weigh the pros and cons here and decide if this crippled fdk-aac version should be included in Fedora, because if yes, then there will certainly be questions from users about it and articles with titles like "Fedora ships broken AAC codec by default, here's how to fix it."


If the decision is to go ahead with this despite the missing expected features, then I'd suggest asking the packager to include prominent notices in package summary, description and README.Fedora detailing what is not working and why.

In addition, the freeness of the license is under dispute. RH Legal says it's free, but Debian thinks a clause is non-free:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1501522#c16
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=694257#20
and we still do not know what the FSF (who is the official authority on what constitutes a free software license) thinks of it (see the discussion in the Fedora review bug).

RH Legal is our final authority in these matters, so Debian's opinion shouldn't be an issue here.

Inclusion of this package would allow out-of-the-box support for AAC, albeit imperfect in some profiles, where currently none exists. Furthermore, this is completely ABI compatible with the unstripped version, so the external repository could cleanly use a -freeworld solution. I don't object to further clarity in README.Fedora, but IMHO Wim's plan is a solid one.

Metadata Update from @sgallagh:
- Issue tagged with: meeting

6 years ago
  • AGREED: inclusion of crippled (but free?) AAC decoder is approved
    (+7,0,-0) (jforbes, 16:15:38)

Metadata Update from @jforbes:
- Issue untagged with: meeting
- Issue status updated to: Closed (was: Open)

6 years ago

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