Hi micah, On Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 10:59:40PM -0400, micah anderson wrote: > > Is the situation that all users that are at 1.2.3-348 and older can > speak to each other and all users that are at 1.2.3-349 and greater can > speak to each other, but >=349 cannot speak to <=348 users? > > If so, is the intended plan for everyone to bump up to >=349? > > If that is true, at the very least this warrants a NEWS entry.
If only it were actually that simple ... The situation looks something like this: - Prior to the squeeze freeze, and after lots of discussion, mumble picked celt 0.7.1 to be the baseline codec for its internal protocol. It still had speex support then, but would prefer to use celt. - For squeeze we provided a system library of that, so that anything else which wanted to experiment with celt would have a version to do that with too. Thorvald was going to encourage other distros to ship this version of celt so there would be interoperability with a broad range of users - but that never happened and they all shipped some other incompatible version of it instead :( Mumble already embeds it's own celt for those. - For squeeze+1, we were fairly sure celt would be obsolete and we'd have Opus by now, and the plan was to drop the system lib when that happened, with mumble making celt a private library of its own (given that it's really the only thing that actually depends on 0.7.1). Eventually all of its users would have Opus and celt could be dropped there too. - We now have Opus, and all versions of celt outside of it are no longer being maintained by anybody. - Out best laid schemes then, true to form, gang aft agley when I learned of reasonable suspicion that 0.7.1 may be carrying a remote crasher among other unfixed issues. These things were fixed in later releases of celt, but given it's an experimental codec, those versions are neither bitstream compatible with 0.7.1, nor are those fixes directly backportable since much of the code has been entirely rewritten numerous times now. - Nobody is committing to maintaining and taking responsibility for celt 0.7.1, or has sufficient 'spare' time and/or the requisite knowledge to fully investigate this further. - Upstream has completely dropped the speex support from clients in recent changes to the code. So at the time of the -349 upload, this was supposed to be temporary, while people investigated the celt issues further. But since then, it's mostly become fairly clear that isn't going to happen in any particularly reassuring way, and people have in fact just reaffirmed that nobody actually wants to be responsible for maintaining celt 0.7.1. So I can't really in good faith sign off on pushing that to the distro for the life of a stable release at this point. Which means the mumble client that we currently have will only interoperate with clients that have opus support. Calling that an "intended plan" seems like an overstatement then ... For the moment, at best, it is Present Day Reality and full of very unintended elements. Given the cloud over celt 0.7.1, encouraging anyone you care about to update to a version using Opus instead seems independently prudent. Given the general state of things, including the zeroc-ice snafu of breaking ABI to "fix the build with gcc 4.7", and the time we have remaining before the freeze, I'm having a very hard time seeing how this might possibly be a viable release candidate for Wheezy anyway at this stage. The only thing that seems to be clear, is that if mumble has a future, it's going to be with opus, not celt. So anybody who wants to help resolve this as quickly as possible, should definitely be focussing on that migration. This is largely out of my power to plan or control, so how long this will take pretty much entirely depends on how long it takes people to tell their friends "it's time to update again". All I can really hope is that it will happen before the blackhats tell them that instead. All I can really do is not make that something Debian's -security team will need to deal with over the life of Wheezy. Sorry, Ron -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
