I was prepared to answer the points earlier in this message, but I've
decided that beyond establishing a patern, they have no importance to
debian-devel, or the eventual (?) inclusion of mplayer in debian.
Also note that I only spent a few minutes looking into the state of
code in mplayer. It's highly likely that there are other license and
copyright irregularities in the codebase as well.[1]
On Sun, 26 Jan 2003, Gabucino wrote:
> Ehh ;) Would you like an >500k diff included in the libmpeg2/ dir?
No. What you need is on every single file in the libmpeg2 directory a
notification stating that this file was modified (if indeed it has
been) and ideally, a changelog describing the modifications.
> See? We won't provide diffs, as long as both sources are in close vicinity.
Huh? The diff was just to provide an illustration of the modifications
to libmpeg2 which need to be documented.
> Also: our libmpeg2 is NOT 0.3.1! It's a modified 0.2.x .
It's apparently a libmpeg2 0.2.1-CVS version, with totally unknown
modifications made to it:
mplayer v0.11-pre27-CVS:
- updated libmpeg2 source to libmpeg2-0.2.1-CVS version
mplayer v0.11-pre26-CVS:
- updated libmpeg2 source to libmpeg2-0.2.0 version
These are the only two changelog entries regarding libmpeg2 that I
could find.[2]
> Well I highly doubt that every program in Debian (that uses modified
> libs) includes diffs.. :) But:
I'm not aware of a single example of a program that uses a GPLed
library internally that doesn't include information on the fact that
there were modifications made. If there were such a thing, I'm pretty
sure that the upstream would correct it as quickly as possible.
And, yes, Debian does distribute diffs for all changes made to a
pristine upstream source. [At least, properly packaged packages do.]
> Well since xine is already in debian, I don't see any reason why
> MPlayer shouldn't be.
The above is just a small slice of the issues which have caused Debian
to shy away from including mplayer.
> So live with it.
Debian, and the Free Software world in general has a nasty habit of
not living with it. It's quite contagious too.
Don Armstrong
1: No I don't know what they are. I just went into the first lib dir
in the source code that I found, and mucked about looking for
information as to what changes had been made to it.
2: MPlayer-0.90rc1/ChangeLog
--
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IE, generic and expensive.
-- hugh macleod http://www.gapingvoid.com/batch3.htm
http://www.donarmstrong.com
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http://rzlab.ucr.edu
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