gentoo VS libarchive

Whilst Firefox may support hardware video decoding, Mesa since March 2022 disables patent encumbered codecs by default[1], and distributions such as Fedora and OpenSuse do not explicitly enable these patent encumbered codecs to avoid possible legal problems. Even Gentoo (built from source code by the user) requires the user to explicitly enable a USE flag (proprietary-codes) to use patent encumbered codecs.[2]

The thought process is that AMD, NVIDIA, Intel and the likes are not providing a patent license with their hardware.[3] They are instead just supplying part of an overall system that together with operating system kernel, display manager software, video player software, etc allows the decoding and encoding of patent encumbered video files. Open source software projects and distributions are concerned they'd be found to be infringing patents by enabling a complete solution out-of-the-box. Hence they put some hurdles in place so that a user has to go out of their way to separately piece together the various parts to form a complete system capable of encoding and decoding patent encumbered codecs.

[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/15...

[2] https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/commit/1265a159743d7f07185a...

[3] https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[email protected]...

Thank you! I don't live in git and this helps! Normally under gentoo I shouldn't have to. This actual git https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo (as opposed to the gentoo browser view) plus this "checkout the commit" should get me much further. ... And probably deserve some space in the gentoo docs.

You choose - here's a list

(pending) gentoo/gentoo #30595 sys-cluster/kubescape: new package, add 2.2.6

profiles/targets/desktop/make.defaults:

29. October 2021 At this point Jia Tan pops up, and the first thing we see from him is an innocuous patch to the xz repository, and while a lot of people believe he started out trying his luck with another library also known as libarchive, this is not the case, I would bet it’s more of a backup looking at the dates, being that there are a few days in between as shown in this commit.

Potentially malicious commit by same author on libarchive: https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive/pull/1609

Full agreement, and with the addition of xpk¹/xfd² as natural extensions to that extensibility too. I see things like xfd supporting xz¹, and I'm simultaneously amazed that it exists and happy that I don't need to do xz {,de}compression on 68k ;)

I guess we have something similar-ish with libarchive⁴, but nobody(including me) has pushed the extra mile to get file dialogs to support random compression and decompression formats.

Beyond OT: I didn't realise how much stuff was still going on at aminet, but I love love LOVE that people are still dropping new car sets for Geoff Crammond's F1GP.

¹ http://aminet.net/package/util/pack/xpk_User

² http://aminet.net/package/util/pack/xfdmaster

³ http://aminet.net/package/util/pack/xfd_lzma.lha

⁴ https://www.libarchive.org/

I don't have a preview channel install handy to check, but apparently they're using libarchive so here's the full list assuming they expose everything it supports:

https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive/wiki/LibarchiveForm...

As announced at the Build conference back in May, this build adds native support for reading additional archive file formats using the libarchive open-source project such as

LibarchiveFormats · libarchive/libarchive Wiki · GitHub

Seems what they're using is BSD-liscensed: https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive/wiki