Comment 6 for bug 1982775

(In reply to caulier.gilles from comment #4)
> Hi Erich,
>
> The solution for you is to use 7.x as well. If ffmpeg 5.x is present, the
> Media Player support will be disabled at configuration time. Of course you
> will not able to play with video files (aka thumbnails and preview will be
> unavailable).

In our packaging we simply had forced it with "DENABLE_MEDIAPLAYER=ON" in our debian/rules file, and removing that enabled it to build in my PPA. I'm working with one of our more senior Ubuntu developers to see if we should proceed with that route, or if he wants to do a manual patch to port it over to ffmpeg5 as he has more experience with that than I do.

> For 8.x, the plan is to release before end of this year and if projects
> advance well, to include the both GoSC 2022 tasks in this release. We will
> see.
>
> https://community.kde.org/GSoC/2022/Ideas#digiKam
>

That will likely not make it in time for 22.10, but will likely make it for 23.04 in April 2023.

> 8.x will be also compatible with Qt 6, but i do not recommend to use Qt6 for
> the moment. 8.x will be compatible with Qt5 LTS, so this version rock well.

I don't foresee the transition to Qt6 for some time.

> About the 8.x pending list bugs, we have the famous Media Player code to
> finalize with ffmpeg 5.x, and other regression checks to verify. For ex, we
> will progressively switch metadata write operations to ExifTool instead
> Exiv2, as this last library break regression tests more and more. ExifTool
> write feature have been introduced in 8.x only. We need to check
> performances and suitability.
>
> Don't forget the bundles that we provide, as AppImage which still compiled
> with ffmpeg 4.x. There are 2 versions: one build by the team, other one
> build with KDE infrastructure.

Appimages cannot be packaged in Ubuntu under any circumstances.. However, there is a snap which, if a couple of things were tweaked, could be seeded. However, I think we might have a solution with the .deb package whether it's the port or the mediaplayer disable.

> The first one is provided since a very long time and is very powerful and
> complete. It's based on 7.x code.
>
> https://files.kde.org/digikam/
>
> The second one need to be finalized as it do not support Mysql/mariadb
> database. It based on 8.x code. Some links:
>
> https://binary-factory.kde.org/view/AppImage/job/Digikam_Nightly_appimage-
> centos7/

Remember, I'm coming at this from a packaging/distribution perspective, so I'm looking for pre-release code as opposed to pre-release compiled/executable code. If we can get it in to the repository prior to our Feature Freeze, then that negates the need for a Feature Freeze Exception when a digiKam final release would come later as it would be considered a bugfix.

Thanks for your time, Gilles. I really appreciate it. If you have any other info, that would be helpful.

Erich