[MPlayer-dev-eng] MPlayer packaging (was Re: .deb of 0.90rc4 for Woody)

[Dominik Mierzejewski]

Since this is a more general issue than just Debian packaging,
I changed the subject.

On Tuesday, 25 February 2003, Greg Stark wrote:
> 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.

Real, Win32 and QT support doesn't depend on anything. If you have those
external DLLs, MPlayer can use them, but if you don't it will still work
without them. It doesn't make any sense splitting off support for these.

> > 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.

But it's trivial to have a separate GUI version. Just build MPlayer once
with --enable-gui and rename the resulting binary to gmplayer. Then rebuild
it once more without --enable-gui. That way they can be installed
independently. That's what I do for the official RPMs.

[...]
> > 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.

Agreed.

-- 
MPlayer RPMs maintainer: http://www.piorunek.pl/~dominik/linux/pkgs/mplayer/
"The Universe doesn't give you any points for doing things that are easy."
        -- Sheridan to Garibaldi in Babylon 5:"The Geometry of Shadows"