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another mplayer .deb of 0.90rc3 release



hello to everybody

here is another package of mplayer  :-)
(prepared for Debian testing)

http://tonelli.sns.it/pub/mplayer


Here is the history of our effort.
  ---
In Sep 2001, Dariush filed an "Intent to Package mplayer" for Debian.
I wished to sponsor. We decided (~1 year ago) to try to put
together a package of mplayer that would be accepted into the
mainstream Debian distribution.

I had these priorities in mind:
0) package must comply with Debian Free Software Guideline (DFSG)
  and with Debian policy
1) package must be lintian clean (as much as possible)
2) package should be well designed:  
    debconf configuration
    split documentation 
    split gmplayer
3) package should offer some extras such as:
    automatic codec download
    flexible debian/rules that can be used by users for custom packages
    mencoder and other tools
(and the general rule: keep it simple)

BTW: we knew that Christian Marillat would not mantain an official
Debian package.
[http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2003/debian-devel-200301/msg00815.html]
Moreover, last time I looked into it, his packages contained some
extra features (e.g. lame) that are not accepted in Debian. This
was indeed discussed in the above thread.

So, we read all the licenses and copyrights (Debian is very picky 
about it), we waited until mplayer had runtime CPU detetection, 
and until it had an opensource debugged DivX player; then
we prepared a package, and we proposed it Debian in october.
It was refused, since ftp-installer asked more clarifications on some
licenses (there are files  with strange copyrights, 
see libvo/vo_md5.c as an example).

So we started again.

We asked the authors some clarifications on licenses. Now we think that
we have a package that suits 0 and 1; so I uploaded it into the
incoming queue. We are waiting for ftp-installer to reply.

Note that our package still needs some work on issues 2 and 3.

In the meantime Robert Nagy has posted another ITP
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2003/debian-devel-200301/msg00796.html
I am currenty exchanging e-mails with him. I am trying to merge
the best of the two packaging.

 ---

Someone asked: Why bother? 
Because 'mplayer' is an hell of a wonderful program!
With the help of the win32 codecs (that the script 
/usr/share/mplayer/scripts/win32codecs.sh
will automatically download), it plays any kind of movie clip that
I have ever downloaded from Internet (and I have a big collection),
included Microsoft, Quicktime, Realplayer formats.

 ---

So now I am asking if people can test our package.

debian-legal: please read debian/README.Debian.2 in the source;
 do you think that  it is/isn't fit to go into Debian?

debian-devel: any comment/critics?

 ---

btw: I stumbled into 
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2003/debian-devel-200301/msg01712.html
I think that all issues are solved by now
(AFAIK Arpi was asking not to distribute binaries before
 run-time-cpu-detection); but for point 4.
So if people on debian-legal thinks that it is important, I will add
a diff of libmpeg2. 

 ---

have fun

a.

-- 
Andrea Mennucc
 "E' un mondo difficile. Che vita intensa!" (Tonino Carotone)



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