Hi, I recently stumbled upon funny xvid bug[0] and thought it might be sensible to disable enabling on it by default on desktop profiles. https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/message/bc06d5c138e8a84f32351493a0831e46 xvid codebase is old, crusty and contains some scary things in makefiles and autoconf, linked bug is just a tip of the iceberg. as far as I know most video tools that use ffmpeg can still play xvid encoded videos without USE=xvid enabled for ffmpeg. This flag enabled encoding. And it's very strange thing to do to encode xvid videos in 2022 =) Can I ask you to double-check dependencies of your packages wrt xvid? I quickly glanced over build files and here are my initial conclusions, but I defer to you to verify. media-libs/libopenshot: does not really need xvid dependency. looks like a catch-all dep, enabled just in case. media-plugins/mythplugins: it has a knob for it's internal ffmpeg to build xvid, but looks like it will build just fine with system ffmpeg without xvid enabled. media-gfx/blender: looks like catch-all dep, enabled just-in-case. If I disable USE=xvid by default (I do NOT intend to remove it, just flip the default), users of your packages might need to flip it back. So before doing it I decided check with you first, maybe you adjust dependencies to be not required or conditional. Thanks in advance for looking at it! [0] https://bugs.gentoo.org/831044
Hello! Sorry for taking so long to get back to you. The xvid useflag is enabled by default in the blender ebuild because that is one of the media formats that is expected to be supported. More specifically, the automated tests uses a few xvid files for regression testing. If we disable this flag, then some of those will fail as the xvid files can't properly be opened. Perhaps not a good reason to have it flipped on per default, we could have it tied to the `test` flag to make it more explicit if you insist.
Closing, at this point the only package left that depends on [xvid] that I can see is blender and don't think we need a general bug assigned to media-video for this. Albeit unless it's a hard requirement, I do feel that blender may as well do away with it at this point even if it's something it supports. It could depend on [xvid] only for tests if it needs it for that.
