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

[Greg Stark]

Arpi <arpi at thot.banki.hu> writes:

> lol
> according to the thread (which turned to flame) at debian-devel they don't
> even want to disable most options, but also remove parts of the code
> rendering it to unusable!
> 
> if it's true, an dit's against their policy, then they should do read it.
> Gabu, do you want to tell them to read their policy? :)))

Well yeah, things get more complicated when the reason for the package split
is licensing / IP issues and earlier crypto export issues.

Essentially the packaging policy says not to make things like x/no-x packages,
but rather build with X and expect users to have xlibs installed even on
servers even if they're not actually running an X server. 

The only benefit to a no-x package is that the user doesn't have to have xlibs
installed on a server, but xlibs are small and once other packages require
them there's no added benefit.

Most programs behave properly when they're built with X but run without it.

This generalizes to any optional feature like jpeg support or such.

It doesn't really generalize to the case where distributing the binary with
some options enabled is legal in some countries and not others. Debian has a
non-US archive that crypto programs used to go in so they wouldn't be on US
servers and wouldn't possibly get exported. This is mostly irrelevant for
crypto now though.

I'm not clear how that relates to mplayer since most of the legally
questionable things are legally questionable in many countries, not just the
US.

Obviously, when policy says to compile with lots of options, it's not
specifically suggesting people break any laws :)

--
greg