[MPlayer-users] Uoti nonsense, and my parting words

[Krzysztof Duchnowski]

On 22.05.2010 21:23, Phil Rhodes wrote:

> To build the source of any non-trivial FOSS package is invariably a 
> nightmare of configuration file editing, downloading source and headers, 
> copying things into the right directory, poking a few more text files, 
> fiddling around. And yes I know all the excuses that exist for this: it's my 
> package manager's fault, it's my distro's fault, some aspect or other of my 
> system "sucks" but the fact remains that this is very, very difficult to do 
> for those of us who aren't both software engineers and Linux systems 
> administrators of significant experience.

Hm... I've never edited any MPlayer compilation configuration files.
It's fully automatic (and I must say it's best implementation that I've
ever seen - there is config.log to look what's missing which isn't
standard thing in other projects) and discovers everything by itself so
no need to guess why it didn't configured some option which name isn't
linked to exact package name that's needed by it (I've seen such project
where user don't know completely what's going on except that there is an
error).
And I've installed headers and additional packages for additional things
that I've needed only but MPlayer compilation didn't really need it.
All packages that's really required was in my distribution already and
I've need only few header packages (distribution maintainers thought
that their statistical user will never compile bu hands anything so not
even *build-essentials* are installed by default not to mention of *any*
devel package for anything - storage space savings) which are descripted
at MPlayer homepage.
And I didn't need to copy anything to any *right* directory.
And the only text file that I've pocked was MPlayer config file after
compilation because I want some option to be enabled by default like XV
video output, ALSA audio output, fullscreen video or snapshot mode
enabled (I'm lazy bum which don't want to type in console to much to
frequently) or different presets for different sources (normal files or
DVD) for shell command (no GUI) version.

Really, thought MPlayer is a huge project but its compilation is one of
the easiest that I've seen thus far.

-- 
Krzysztof 'DK75' Duchnowski
GetFirefox - http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/
Konfiguracja UTF-8 dla czytników - http://evil.pl/pip/utf/