[libcamera-devel] Renaming of libcamera-apps

[Naushir Patuck]

Hi all,

If you don't use the Raspberry Pi libcamera-apps applications, please
ignore this email.

What's happening?
libcamera-apps has not been renamed to rpicam-apps. This includes all
the applications (e.g. libcamera-still -> rpicam-still, libcamera-vid
- > rpicam-vid, etc.), the library file (libcamera_app.so ->
rpicam_app.so), deb packages (e.g. libcamera-apps -> rpicam-apps), and
the github repo (https://github.com/raspberrypi/libcamera-apps ->
https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpicam-apps).

Why?
libcamera-apps has always been owned and maintained by Raspberry Pi as
a suite of camera applications that uses the libcamera API to drive
our cameras on the platform. However because of the naming, some
people have come to associate libcamera-apps with the core libcamera
dev team. This places an unnecessary burden on them when these users
reach out to them for support or bug reports. To avoid such confusion
going forward, we are removing "libcamera-" from the package names.

What do I need to do?
In the short term, nothing. The build scripts will provide symlinks
for the old application and library names to the new names. The old
repo URL and apt packages should automatically redirect to the new
one. So ideally, nothing needs to change immediately with existing
workflows.

However, we strongly encourage everyone to start using the new names
as soon as possible. In the future, the symlinks and redirects will be
removed and the old naming scheme will be deprecated.

What if things go wrong?
Please create a github issue on
https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpicam-apps and we will try and get
things fixed as soon as possible.

Thanks,
Naush