Re: Viewing avi files

[Bijan Soleymani <bijan@psq.com>]

Jaye Inabnit ke6sls wrote:

> My point is that I believe there is a documented Debian way to use 
> source code to build a full .deb file so that the user has the power of 
> dpkg/apt to add/remove it (the package, doc, config etc) later.  In fact, I 
> wouldn't be surprised if there was a mini how-to for this.  Food for thought.
Yes, as I believe you wrote earlier, mplayer source contains a debian 
directory.
You can build a debian package from the files in that directory.

This is even documented in the documentation for mplayer.
Following is the relevant section from 
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/documentation.html:

   "6.1 Debian packaging

   To build the package, get the cvs version, or .tgz and uncompress 
it, and cd into programs     directory:

 	  cd main
	    fakeroot debian/rules binary

   (... mplayer detects hardware/software, builds itself and.. ) 
dpkg-deb: building package         `mplayer' in 
`../mplayer_0.90-1_i386.deb'.

   And now just become root, and:

 	  dpkg -i ../mplayer_0.90-1_i386.deb as root.

   Here's how it looks like:

		eyck@incubus:/src/main$ sudo dpkg -i ../mplayer_0.90-1_i386.deb
		Password:
		(Reading database ... 26946 files and directories currently installed.)
		Preparing to replace mplayer 0.50-1 (using ../mplayer_0.90-1_i386.deb)
		Unpacking replacement mplayer ...
		Setting up mplayer (0.90-1) ..."


However there are no simple dependencies for mplayer, you might never want
certain inputs and outputs. Even major components are optional (I never 
install the
GUI).

So that installing the debian package and installing from source are almost
identical. In either case the simplest way to get the features you need, 
is to
install the relevant debian dev packages. For example if you want aalib 
support:
apt-get install aalib1-dev (same idea for svga-lib, sdl, ogg/vorbis).

I myself use make install and make uninstall to install/remove mplayer.
This is just because mplayer is updated so often, that i need to upgrade 
quickly.
Making a deb package then installing/uninstalling that is just an extra 
step, and doesn't
really change much.

Bijan