Main Inclusion Report for schroedinger

Requirements

1. Availability: http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/s/schroedinger/; available for all supported architectures

2. Rationale:

   • Provides support for Dirac, a relatively new free video codec developed by the BBC. Among other sources, Dirac content is beginning to become available through the Totem BBC plugin in Ubuntu 8.10, which will put it up-front in the desktop; providing the maximum possible support for free video formats in Ubuntu seems generally to be a good thing.

   • See the short discussion on ubuntu-devel.

3. Security:

   • CVE entries: none

   • Secunia history: none

   • No binaries running as root or set-id; no daemons. This is just a codec. Similarly, it does not itself open network ports.
   • However, the Schroedinger codec will typically be used to parse video data arriving over the network, and thus is potentially vulnerable to decoding bugs (like other codecs).

   • I (ColinWatson) have only done an extremely shallow review. In general I found the code to be well-organised (many small functions, reference-counting, functions organised into files according to the names of the structures they manipulate, etc.), although almost entirely devoid of comments so it was hard for a casual observer to figure out what was going on.

4. Quality assurance:

   • The package works out of the box without configuration, and asks no debconf questions.

   • Debian bugs: one relevant bug (#468766) about Dirac files crashing totem; upstream cannot reproduce and nor can I.

   • Maintenance in Debian is vigorous; the maintainer has packaged each new upstream release (at least since 1.0.0) within at most two days.

   • Upstream is reasonably vigorous; the last new upstream release was in July 2008 and there has been considerable work in git since then.

   • Upstream bug tracker: much of this is internal work and there's nothing very scary as far as I can see.

   • There is a substantial test suite, run as part of the Debian build process.

5. Standards compliance:

   • Complies with the FHS and Debian Policy.

   • I believe it complies with the Debian library packaging guide, at least in important areas, though I'm far from an expert.

   • Uses cdbs with simple-patchsys. I don't see any notable packaging oddities.

6. Dependencies:

   • All in main.

7. Maintenance:

   • While the internals of schroedinger are complex, most of the packaging work seems to be either relatively common (library versioning, gstreamer codec metadata, etc.), updating it to new upstream versions, or backporting bug fixes.
   • schroedinger is maintained by Sebastian Dröge, who seems to be doing his usual stellar job of maintenance, and is both a Debian developer and an Ubuntu core developer. It doesn't look as if it desperately needs further dedicated maintenance.

8. Background information:

   • See also the BBC Dirac research codec (information on the Dirac Developers web page). That codec is explicitly not intended for end users.

Reviewers

MIR bug: https://launchpad.net/bugs/279329

ColinWatson