Re: Respect the wishes of the mplayer authors

[guenter geiger <geiger@xdv.org>]

On Thu, 18 Sep 2003, Junichi Uekawa wrote:

>
> > If you do want to include mplayer in your distro, how about releasing it under another name than mplayer, so that the real and lovable mplayer won't be mistaken for a cripled and unusable application? To quote Bruce Perens explaining the 4. right of open source: "if you make a change, you might have to change the name of the program or mark out your change very clearly"
>
> If foolish tells me that's the best way to shut up people,
> then that may be done, especially when mplayer in Debian is not
> the same as what may be obtained from compiling upstream source.

Actually this seems to be a nice and easy solution, but at the end
it is not.

If I understand correctly the parts that are missing are the CSS library,
which definitely can not be distributed.

Another topic is the ffmpeg part. I am asking myself how can it be
that we have a libxine package (a dynamic library) that
includes ffmpeg, but it is not possible to either package ffmpeg
nor to include it in mplayer  ...

I have to agree with sindre and the mplayer authors that removing
ffmpeg cripples mplayer.

Anyhow, the question is not if Debian has mplayer or not,
the question is who decides what gets accepted, and why ?

Is it just luck that xine is in Debian, or is there an explanation ?

Guenter