Re: Bug#732159: Should this package be removed?
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On 12/21/2013 11:08 AM, Moritz Mühlenhoff wrote:
> Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk> schrieb:
>
>> Jonas: Is your view that the packages which aren't working properly
>> with libav (including mplayer) should be removed from Debian ?
>
> mplayer doesn't need to be removed because of any compatibility
> issues with libav. It FTBFSes for entirely unrelated reasons since 9
> months (708140).
I've built the upstream version of it much more recently than that, with
the library package that seems to be involved in that build error
installed and enabled, and it's worked just fine.
> It is simply unmaintained.
If you mean that the package is unmaintained: granted.
If you mean that the program (upstream) is unmaintained: on what do you
base this statement?
I acknowledge that development activity isn't nearly as, er, active as
it once was (years and years ago), but judging by the activity on the
relevant mailing lists (including the commit-log list) it is still going
on, and there was an official release earlier this year - shortly before
that FTBFS was reported against the packaged version. As far as I'm
aware, upstream still considers it to be maintained.
> If there were interest it could easily be fixed. to support current
> libav.
>
> But there's simply no point in doing that work, since mpv is so much
> cleaner and better.
Looking into mpv on the basis of this statement, one question that comes
to my mind is about encoding capabilities. Do we know whether it
supports the capabilities of MEncoder that lead people to still use
MEncoder rather than either FFmpeg or avconv?
That's not a well-formed question, of course, since exactly what those
capabilities are is ill-defined. Judging from discussion on the
mencoder-users mailing list over the last several months (some of which
may have been obsoleted by subsequent development), those features
include:
* DVD-reading capability.
* EDL (edit-decision list) support.
* Binary-codec support - i.e., decoding otherwise-unsupported formats by
use of binary Windows DLLs.
* Support for at least one subtitle-file format.
- From the mpv docs, it seems to support DVD-reading capability and the
subtitle format which was mentioned as unsupported-by-FFmpeg in a
discussion this past June, but it doesn't seem to support EDLs or binary
decoders.
Also, the mpv encoding docs say it doesn't yet support 3-pass encoding
(and don't say anything at all, that I've seen, about N-pass encoding),
which MEncoder does support, at least when using libavcodec.
So it looks like there might be some point in doing the work; it's just
a question of whether there would be enough point for it to be worth the
trouble (in the view of whoever would end up actually doing it).
And yes, as you said earlier, it might be possible to modify the mplayer
package to only build/include MEncoder. However, even aside from
MEncoder being officially deprecated by upstream, it seems likely that
doing that would involve most of the same work as getting MPlayer itself
working again and probably more into the bargain - so if you're going to
do the work anyway, why not retain both?
- --
The Wanderer
Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny.
A government exists to serve its citizens, not to control them.
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