[Mplayer-users] Gui; Make error

[Kjetil Torgrim Homme]

Arpi <arpi at thot.banki.hu> writes:

> Kjetil Torgrim Homme wrote:
> > You know, if it was legal to make binary packages, a lot of the
> > clueless people wouldn't have to struggle with compiling.
>
> It is absolutely wrong assumtion. Now we have compile bugreports.
> If we distribute binary packages, then we get library dependency
> and lib version incompatibility and such bugreports. Even worse.

The people making the package would be responsible for the bugs in
that package.  Nice, eh? :-)

> And also universal packages means a big performance loss (10-20%,
> you may say it's not so big, but ask people here at the boundaries
> of dvd/divx requirements) because the prog isn't fully optimized to
> the given system. This is why distributing binary packages are
> forbidden.

A similar case can be made about Linux kernels -- you can recompile it
to get a few percent extra performance, but Linus doesn't forbid the
distribution of binary packages.

> > Sorry, please enlighten me.  The binary codecs are distributed
> > separately anyway.  The mix of source code licences is unwieldy, but
> > the licences don't seem incompatible.
> 
> Who the fuck spoke about licenses????

The "no binary distribution" clause is part of Mplayer's license.
That clause could have been inherited by one of the libraries used in
Mplayer. *shrug*

> The reason of no binary packages are pure technical, not legal:
> 
> MPlayer code is configured at _compile_time_. So it won't work on
> systems which differ a single bit (including available libs, lib
> versions, cpu, hardware etc). Making different binaries for each
> possible hw/lib combination has no sense (and means 50+ packages).
> Making cpu-independent universal binaries is currently impossible.

Okay, I've looked at this.  You are right that some plugins have
problems in this regard.  I'm willing to help fix that.  In that
regard, I was very glad to see that you are talking to walken about
the possibility of replacing mplayer's forked libac3 with liba52.  (As
you know, liba52 selects code during run-time, and this works with
satisfactory performance in Ogle.)

> You may say we are bad.

No, you're not bad, the fruit of your hard labour, Mplayer, is very
nice!  I do think that it is possible to handle users differently, so
they can become a resource, not an annoyance.  Passing responsibility
for the ignorant users to Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE etc. is one step in
that direction.


Kjetil T.

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