[MPlayer-dev-eng] Re: .deb of 0.90rc4 for Woody

[Greg Stark]

Attila Kinali <kinali at gmx.net> writes:

> If done a small list of the packages that should be created:
> 
> general packages: 
>  mplayer-$variant, mencoder, mplayer-doc, mplayer-win32, mplayer-qtx,
>  mplayer-real, libdha, vidix
> 
> Here i want to split libdha and vidix out of the main package because they may
> be used with other programs as well

Sure, splitting libraries and lesser used binaries from the main package is a
fine thing to do. Especially if things like mplayer-real can go in contrib
(because they depend on non-free stuff) while the main packages stay in main.

> The main switches for the mplayer-$variant packages are:
> gui/nongui
> real/nonreal
> x: vidix,dga,gl,vesa,mga,xmga,xv,vm,xinerama,x11,fbdev 
> no-x:vidix,vesa,svga,mga,fbdev
> oss/alsa

No, this violates Debian policy. Generally debian packages should be built
with all the options enabled, or at least all the commonly desired ones that
can reasonably be used together.

The no-x variant plan is specifically unrecommended by Policy even for
programs like emacs. Redhat used to do this at the time the policy was written
and it was decided it was a cause of more problems than it solved.

Having a single version just means some more libraries might need to be
installed to satisfy dependencies. It should be possible and it usually is
possible to disable the actual use of those features at runtime. I'm pretty
sure it is for mplayer for all those features above.

> which creates folowing packages:
> 
> nongui,non-x,no-real,oss
> nongui,non-x,no-real,alsa
> nongui,x,no-real,oss
> nongui,x,no-real,alsa
> nongui,x,real,oss
> nongui,x,real,alsa
> nongui,x,no-real,oss
> nongui,x,no-real,alsa
> nongui,x,real,oss
> nongui,x,real,alsa

These are a bad idea.

> --enable-win32
> --disable-xanim

If the support is compiled in but the win32 dlls or xanim dlls are not present
does everything work well? In which case you should compile with xanim. There
is an xanim installer package that downloads and installs these dlls. They're
not free though so if mplayer won't run without them then things get messy
with the main/contrib/non-free issues.

-- 
greg