[MPlayer-users] Re: gtk2 and mplayer 0.91

[Jonathan Rogers]

D Richard Felker III wrote:
>>It sounds like it was the MPlayer configure that was hideous and broken 
>>and that it was the ebuild that forced the MPlayer's configure to be 
>>cleaned up. If you build MPlayer yourself, you can fix the ebuild based 
> 
> 
> Perhaps. But there's nothing wrong with having *experimental* options
> (which are marked as such!) in your configure script, for developers
> to use, in a pre-1.0 version. What *is* broken is for a distro's
> package to use these options just because they sound "cool"...

If they're clearly marked as "experimental," it is probably a mistake to 
enable them by default. In the past, I've encountered several configure 
options (such as for dvdnav) that were not labeled as experimental, but 
broke stuff anyway.

Also, keep in mind that Gentoo is much more bleeding edge than most 
distros. Gentoo "stable" ebuilds are typically newer and less stable 
than Debian "unstable" ones. This is one of the reasons I wouldn't 
recommend Gentoo easily. The benefit is flexibility, but I've seriously 
considered going back to Debian. I've had my Gentoo system for over a 
year now, but if I had to start from scratch, I might go back.

Jonathan Rogers