one last shot about mplayer
Hi there!
I do not wish to stir up the flamewar, but here is one more thought:
(well..I am not quite sure wherher this is really a new, but I have not
seen it here lately)
I think we sould create a debian package called mplayer-installer.
This package, upon installation, could inform the user about the
questionable legal status of soveral parts of mplayer/libraries
compatible with mplayer, and ask him/her whether to download each of
them.
Like this:
"
Optional component: libavcodec
Description:
There is a state-of-the art codec library, called libavcodec, which is
part of the open-source ffmpeg project. Using this library with mplayer
you can play decent movies, even on low-end computers, but some people
might consider this a patent infregement, or a license violation. (The
author of mplayer don't, there is a debate going on about this.)
Do you want to download this library, compile it and use it with
mplayer?
Your choice:
[Yes] [No] [Tell me more]
[Don't care s*** like this, download everything]
"
When the user specified exactly what he/she wants to use, the installer
script could download the parts (which could be stored in separate
tarballs on the ftp.mplayer.hq), copy them together, and
compile them.
This approach has several advangates:
- Debian does not have to distribute the sources itself,
so there would be no legal risks (i think) risk.
- The users may decide whethet they are concerned by the
"quastionable" legal status of some parts of the code.
- The sources are compiled on the user's box, so optimalization
is also possible.
- Since the debian package downloads the sources from the mplayerhq
site, it does not have to be updated very often.
Some more suggestions:
- I am sure that everybody can agree the there is a large part of
mplayer's code which is 100% pure GPL. This code (in source form)
could be packaged as mplayer-src-base.deb, so that it could be
put on the CD-ROMs and distributed in the mirror system, to
reduce the amount of data that has to be downloaded from
mplayerhq.
- There could be an mplayer-installer-cvs package, too,
that downloads the stuff directly from the cvs snaphot.
One could argue that this process is to difficult for the avarage user.
But I think if it's implemented the Right Way, the whole thing the user
would have to do could be as simple as
apt-get install mplayer-installer<ENTER>
<ENTER> (several times)
(wait....)
and voila!
...Just an idea. What do you think?
--
Csillag Kristof <csillag@member.fsf.org>
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