[TYPO3-core] Flowplayer in TYPO3

[Ernesto Baschny]

Hi,

Christian Welzel - the maintainer of the debian package of TYPO3 -
brought to our attention that packaging TYPO3 CMS for Debian "main"
currently has a policy problem with the Flowplayer.

This is our component which renders movies and audio files in the
Frontend (through the MEDIA or FLOWPLAYER content objects).

Debian has the policy that all binary files shipped in main must be
build with tools also available in main. Unfortunately there is no
Actionscript 3 compiler in debian that can compile the flowplayer. So
Christian has to either:

a) remove the flowplayer swf files (which will leave MEDIA semi
functional) or
b) move typo3 to debian/contrib (which is not available for installation
by default) or
c) not ship typo3 in debian at all.

What is your opinion on the matter?

Some more comments:

First there is the backwards compatibility problem. TYPO3 needs to
continue working after an upgrade. So simply "removing" it won't be
possible in 6.2.

One potential solution would be to move the code into a separate
(system) extension, which we could also provide through TER. Christian
could "simply remove" the sysext before uploading to Debian, and people
could download it again from TER.

Maybe we could even remove it from Core altogether and provide an
Upgrade Wizard for fetching it from TER if required.

The integration of Flowplayer is somehow "tricky" and "hacky", and it
will probably not be so easy to "split it out" into an extension.

Second problem is that the Core team currently does not maintain
extensions in TER, and there is no policy on them. One possibility which
we could also use in other situations would be to introduce more "Core
maintained extensions in TER". Extensions which follow the Core
principles (the CGL, Deprecation policy, Security Policy and handling,
release cycles in line with TYPO3 Core release cycles etc), but could be
released and patched more independently from the core.

Regards,
Ernesto Baschny

-- 
Ernesto Baschny
TYPO3 CMS Core Developer
Release Manager TYPO3 4.5 & 6.2 LTS

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