[MPlayer-dev-eng] Re: [MPlayer-DOCS] letter to distro mplayer packagers?

[Sebastian Dröge]

On Sa, 2005-11-26 at 19:01 +0100, Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski wrote:
> > e.g. users come into #mplayer:
> > [09:05] <ProN00b> MPlayer dev-CVS--4.0.2
> > [09:05] <ProN00b> thats my current version
> > [09:05] <ProN00b> is it old ?
> > [09:09] <ProN00b> i think so, its ubuntu's newest package
> > 
> > or just put the letter in the news section of mphq.
> > could make it a comedy piece, like "top 10 things wrong with mplayer packages."
> 
> As expected from our favourite Christian Marillat (Cc'd), who is listed as
> the maintainer.
> 
> I've just looked at the packaging and it's horrible. I don't know too much
> about debian packaging, but it seems it requires dirty hacks to package
> the skin, too. Either that, or Christian doesn't know how to make good
> maintainable packages, though it may be thanks to others who modified this
> package in Ubuntu: Christian Bjälevik and Sebastian Dröge (I'm Cc'ing
> them).
> 
> They use a lot of --enable-* for things that should be left for
> autodetection. They're using their own custom config.h and config.mak
> (which I think is consistent with the previous observation). They patch
> libdha to be static. They package codecs.conf(!). And their idea of telling
> users that it's a Debian binary package is to change the "compiled with
> runtime cpu detection" message to "compiled for debian".
> 
> And this... this is unparalleled stupidity:
> 
> --- mplayer-1.0-pre7cvs20050716.orig/version.h
> +++ mplayer-1.0-pre7cvs20050716/version.h
> @@ -0,0 +1 @@
> +#define VERSION "dev-CVS--4.0.2"
> 
> We have no way of knowing if they really used gcc-4.0.2 to compile it and
> which version it really is.
> 
> So please, guys, read our packaging guidelines at
> http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/tech/binary-packaging.txt .
> I wish you would follow at least some of them, but if you really don't
> want to, then at least modify the version string accordingly. Your comments
> about the guidelines are most welcome, too.

Hi,
thanks for forwarding this mail to us.
I'm aware of most of these issues and working on a cleaner packaging for
the next Ubuntu release which will not be based on marillat's package
and takes the recommendations of the mplayer packaging guidelines into
account.

My and Christian's modifications to marillat's package for ubuntu were
only correcting Build-Depends and some other minor things to get it
built and working for us.

Bye

PS: please CC me on all following answers :)