On Tue, Jul 15, 2003 at 12:09:21AM -0700, David Nusinow wrote:
> > Christian Marillat has had Debian packages for stable and unstable for
> > quite some time now.
> >
> > http://marillat.free.fr/ For more information.
>
> But he refuses to officially support them, and I can't say I blame him.
> Getting mplayer in to Debian is more a political problem than anything,
> as both groups have managed to totally alienate each other fairly
> recently. The trick will be to find a maintainer who's willing to step
> in to that line of fire.
Since I'm pretty new to Debian development I wouldn't be worried about
stepping into that line of fire.
But the central problem with packaging a generic mplayer means that most
of the bells and whistles have to be enabled, and the features that
people use mplayer chiefly for are non-free Windows Media/QuickTime
support. And it's not heavily optimized for your architecture, which in
the case of this application probably makes a significant difference, at
least more so than following this philosophy for other programs.
If there were a mplayer in Debian I doubt I would use it because of the
inflexibility it provides.
For example, I don't use the Debian sylpheed-claws package becauseevery
single useless plugin is enabled, and I don't need 80% of the enabled
features. Also, the release cycle is very fast, and I'm keeping track of
a bug that is neither fixed upstream or in Debian...so I use the CVS
sources and build regularly from them.
-Josh
--
"Notice that, written there, rather legibly, in the Baroque style common
to New York subway wall writers, was, uhm... was the old familiar
suggestion. And rather beautifully illustrated, as well..."
-- Art Garfunkel on the inspiration for "A Poem On The Underground Wall"
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