[MPlayer-users] -noaspect doesn't disable aspect-thingies?

[Daniel A. Nagy]

> Hi,
> 
> > I've got MPlayer CVS-011114-10:59 installed (Debian unstable & the
> > packages from marillat.free.fr) and it seems that there is no way to
> you should use official releases. i bet 0.50 or CVS version will work.
> marillat refused to stop distributing bad broken shit.

Right, mplayer is definitely not ready for binary distribution, and the
debian support is great (nice job, Dariusz!). Read the docs to find out how
to build the binary packages for thyself.

BTW: Pine has some licensing problems that mess with the debian licensing
when it comes to binary distribution. The way debian people resolved it is
that they made binary packages that were in fact source packages with the
compilation and packaging scripts bundled. Thus, if you installed the pine
package, you needed to run one script to get binary pine compiled and
installed on your system automagically. Can we do that?

The other thing that comes to mind is the Linux kernel. It is also blatantly
suboptimal to use a one-size-fits-all kernel that is optimized for 386.
Therefore, debian offers lots of precompiled kernels for most common boxen,
but if you have something exotic (like me :-), you can still install the
kernel source package and build the binary package yourself. Debian wants to
keep track of your kernel (some packages depend on different kernel versions
and patches), so you don't want to compile a kernel and circumvent the
packaging system. I'm assuming our situation is somewhat similar. It takes
little effort (I could handle it in cooperation with Dariusz) to make one
debian binary source package (technically: a binary package that contains
the source) and assloads of binary packages for the most common architectures.

But for the time being, the best thing a debian user can do is to download
one of the official source tarball releases and do what the manual says.

Happy hacking!

-- 
Dan