[MPlayer-dev-eng] first draft of an mplayer installation script

[Petri Kanerva]

First, it's great to ease these sometime difficult processes for the
not-so-techie users, but there are a few things in your idea, that IMHO
are no so great:

> -download codecs,font,standard gui, and MPlayer 
And here we go with the mainstream again. Not everybody have internet
connections at home. And ppl with modems don't want to dl everything at
home, in the extreme case they ever want to load anything. There should
also be an option to use a directory, where the user has placed the
packages he/she has downloaded elsewhere.


And then to my views on your script:

Atleast on my system (Slackware 8.0, largely self-upgraded) the script
didn't run without modifying. You have split up the lines with \, but
then at the beginnign of the next line you use spaces, not tabs, and
that makes errors. So use tabs.

Section:  download everything from the web
Maybe you should check that wget is installed, and if not, inform the
user that we need it and then exit from the script.
And what if the mirror that the user selected isn't available for some
reason. In that case the user should be prompted to select another
mirror, or the script just should automatically try another.

Section:  ./configure,make,make install
Before removing the old executables, I'd just check if they're there.
There should be no harm in just rm'ing them the way you do, but
personally I don't like doing something to something before I've checked
that that something is really there, harm or no harm. Just my view.

Section:  /dev/rtc setup
And again, maybe you should check that rc.sysinit exists before writing
to it. The user might click 'yes' to add the line to there, even if it
doesn't exists. Just like Levi pointed out in he's reply, all platforms
supported by MPlayer doesn't have this, and the user might not know what
he/she's system has. This should be checked before the dialog, and the
dialog should only be shown in the case that rc.sysinit was found.