[MPlayer-dev-eng] Offer of help to get me started

[Arpi]

Hi,

> > contributors are happier with it than before.  The problem of bloated
> > cvs logs/diffs can be addressed by strictly splitting off cosmetics
> > from "real" commits, like we do with the docs.
> 
> also have to mention that many of the files in mplayer source tree are from
> other projects. for example, pnm.c is from xine, files at loader/ from
> avifile, and so on. many files are often diff'ed to the originals and merged
> teh changes to and back. if you reformat them, it makes diff'ing harder (yes
> i know that diff has -b -B etc options but they do't wrok as good as they
> should, and they cannot handle { moving to next line after if()).
> note, that there are even files which are only partially from other
> projects, some even mixed from multiple files, causing the file having
> multiple indent/style...
> 
> so, think it twice (or more) before decide to mess up cvs, please.

i forgot to mention some more things.
there are many (>10) unapplied patches (see TODO, incoming/peccsek.tar.gz)
which won't apply any more after a cosmetics change!
the same applies to all patches peple send against release versions (yes
they should make them against cvs but they don't do many times)
and vice versa: if they make patches for cvs, they will be unusable for 0_90.

it's very common to check the diff between 2 versions of a file, to see the
changes or trace bugs. if you want to diff a version between and a version
after the 'big cosmetics mess' (cvs diff -r1.x -r1.y) it will be impossible.

Diego mentioned the DOCS. docs is very different. a given doc translation
is maintained by a single person, no style clash. also, it's quite rare to
diff docs versions, even rare to read cvslog of docs. it is not true for code!

I agree with Rich in his opinion: some respected coder (like Michael, for
example) should decide (vote) this question, instead of unknown evil people
or doc maintainer(s) who never actually worked on mplayer codebase.


A'rpi / Astral & ESP-team

--
Developer of MPlayer, the Movie Player for Linux - http://www.MPlayerHQ.hu