while working on vcmi for Debian I made some tiny changes here and there which you can find in the attached patch (it’s a bit weird that the forum software restricts by file extension - why does it not restrict by filetype instead? Anyhow, I just renamed it from diff to txt). It does:
add --help and --version output to vcmiserver (this allows to generate a man page for vcmiserver as well)
fix some spelling mistakes
adds a Keywords entry to the *.desktop files (feel free to add more keywords)
I also created a patch which uses avconv instead of ffmpeg in vcmibuilder but that patch is not suitable for being applied by you because it is Debian specific and hopefully can be removed soon once ffmpeg is back in Debian.
This is what I see when running ffmpeg on my system (Ubuntu):
*** THIS PROGRAM IS DEPRECATED ***
This program is only provided for compatibility and will be removed in a future release. Please use avconv instead.
So on Ubuntu we’ll have to switch to avconf at some point of time as well (and let’s hope that their API will remain same so I won’t have to keep two versions of video player)
What about adapting such patch so it will work for any system? Something like this pseudocode:
if (ffmpeg exists)
CONVERT_CMD=ffmpeg
else if (avconv exists)
CONVERT_CMD=avconv
else
error("ffmpeg/avconv not found, please install it first")
This false claim (ffmpeg is not deprecated at all) and other shortcomings of avconv in comparison to ffmpeg led to long and emotional discussions of reintroducing ffmpeg in Debian. Back when avconv was forked away from ffmpeg the reason it was included in Debian (and Ubuntu) instead of ffmpeg was that the maintainers were one of those involved in the fork.
At least for the purposes of vcmibuilder, a s/ffmpeg/avconv/g already made the script work flawlessly. It might be better to suppor both because it’s likely that ffmpeg might come back into Debian (and thus Ubuntu) in the future. The discussion about that happens at: bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugrepo … bug=729203