[MPlayer-dev-eng] mplayer vs debian

[Dirk]

Attila Kinali wrote:

>Hi,
>
>I guess most people dont know me, so please let me introduce first:
>My name is Attila Kinali, i live in Switzerland and a free software addict
>for some years. I guess i dont use debian as long as most of you, but
>i guess 3.5y isnt bad either. I follow the mplayer development since
>its first public release, send some patches here and there and also did
>a lot of user support over the last 2 years.
>
>>From this you can imagine, that i know both debian and mplayer very well
>and i choose both of them because i wanted the best thing i can get.
>2 years ago, mplayer was the best mpeg player i could find, just as debian
>was the best distribution i could get my hands on.
>
>I like both, but i also know that the ways things are done in both
>projects are that different, that there will never be a real merge
>(ie an inclusion of mplayer packages in debian) of both. This is not
>because the mplayer developers like to be illegal and have to show
>their rebellion against the world or because the debian developers
>are to stubborn and bound too much to their legal stuff. No, it's
>because their aims are different. 
>
>While mplayer tries to make the best movie player ever for unix
>platforms (assumed you have enough intelligence to read the
>manual first) and thus first code is written and afterwards asked
>whether it was legal or not. This lead to a player that is fast [1]
>and pretty much stable [2] which is used by a lot of peopel all
>around the world. Also the permanent requests for the inclusion
>of different distributions is a sign of the success of this
>"way of development".
>
>On the other hand we have debian, with its huge quality control
>system and legal concerns. debian has proved to be one of the
>best distributions (imho _the_ best) in the world of linux.
>It's way is mostly to get things right the first time, because
>a mistake could be fatal for the whole project. This lead
>to several decisions which made some developers or users unhapy,
>but assured the high over all quality of debian.
>
>Now this two different world views collide. The mplayer team
>on one side wants, if there will be any packages, that they
>are as good as possible. On the other side, the debian developers
>cant include a full featured packages of mplayer as it is
>either too difficult or has legal issues.
>
>Marillat tried to provide such packages and succeded in getting
>them spread and used. But he did a mistake, he never contacted
>the developers about what he was doing nor was his name known
>to anyone of the team before. This wouldnt be so bad, if there
>werent problems with his packages. The problem descriptions
>were most time strange at least and ever resolved by compiling
>mplayer by hand. And noone of this could be ever reproduced by
>either me or anyone else of the mplayer team.
>So i contacted him and asked whether he we could try to get
>his packages improved. At this time (iirc 2 months ago)
>he didnt seem to know that there were problems with his packages,
>but he accepted the cooporation. I had a look at his build
>script but didnt like the way it did things, so i tried
>to do it better and started to write a buildscript myself
>before i wrote back. After a weekend of RTFM, coding and trying
>i realized how much work it was to get mplayer packaged.
>Only to get a simple selection on which libs had to be included
>produced 10 different packages (multiply this by 10 if you want
>to get most of the cpu's supported as well). Another around 10
>packages had to be build for (half legal) stuff like different
>dlls and libraries that gave additional functionality but
>werent in debian (like all the win32 stuff, qt codecs, skins etc).
>Unfortunately, due to lack of time i was never able to finish it
>and i dont think i will in the next few months.
>
>
>And now we are were there is war between debian and mplayer,
>which reasons i cannot fully understand. There is a lot of
>flaming, bleeching, lieing and ignoring.
>Infact i havent read so much shit in a thread since the
>gcc 2.96 incident.
>Really, both sides should know better than that. You arent
>children anymore, are you ?
>
>So, PLEASE STOP THIS MEANINGLES FLAMEING AND GO TO DO SOMETHING
>MORE SENSEFULL. (sorry, for being loud)
>
>If there is no chance of mplayer getting included in debian,
>so it shall be. If anyone want to really try it, he should
>contact the developers and work with them together, otherwise
>it will never get to a state where it will be usable.
>
>
>I hope, this is the last mail i have to write about this issue,
>have a nice day
>
>			Attila Kinali
>
>[1] Fast in the sense of running fast on a low end machine.
>Yes, it doesnt matter whether you run c code or hand optimized asm code
>on a 2GHz Athlon, 9% or 10% cpu usage doesnt matter. But it is a difference
>if you have just a K6-II 350 with its crappy chipset that is not fast enough.
>There every promille counts and 1% cpu usage makes the difference between
>a nice movie and absolutly unplayable. If anyone does not believe me, get
>you a K6 machine (not a PII as they have a much faster chipset) and try
>different mplayer, xine, avifile,...  versions on it.
>
>[2] Stable as in "should not crash but it may happen in some circumstances
>that are unforseen". I use now mplayer development versions for long enough
>to know that they do a better job in terms of stability than a lot of other
>projects (not limited to movie players).
>
>  
>
It's debians fault for having the HQ in a country with perverted 
software patents...