On Sat, 03 Oct 2015 19:08:52 +0100 Sebastian =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Dr=F6ge?= <sl...@coaxion.net> wrote: > On Mon, 25 Aug 2014 23:12:54 +0200 Luciano Bello <luci...@debian.org> wrote: > > > Please, remove src:libmimic, since nobody is using it and it is used to be > > necessary for some code which found other ways. The code is old, the upstream is > > dead. > > is there any actual reason to remove it? The code is old but it seems > to work well enough. Unless it's completely buggy or similar, I don't > see a reason for it to be removed.
I actually see a reason for it to NOT be removed - aka, a valid use case. I am a developer of (now obsolete) aMSN. We used libmimic for the video conferencing function. We also had a feature called "webcam logs" - aka, dump the libmimic-encoded video file into the hard drive and play it back later. People would then ask how to play back these files outside of aMSN, and we'd tell them to use GStreamer to play them back and/or convert them to another, more useful format. We wanted to keep our code cross-platform in a simpler way, so instead of using the system-wide libmimic, we'd just ship our own variant in the code. Well, now that the servers are dead, aMSN is pretty much obsolete. Therefore, one does need the system-wide libmimic in order to access these old webcam logs. We still do occasionally get people asking how to do that. On the other hand, the code has always worked well enough for us, and in fact it's one of the most stable pieces of code that I've ever seen. We only ever found one bug, encountered by one single person on a Mac, due to endianness - but the person certainly wasn't the first person to use libmimic on a big endian machine. So, if the package isn't really breaking anything or having bugs, and if there are some valid use cases for it, I think it would be wrong to have it removed.
