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

[Reimar Döffinger]

On Sun, May 23, 2010 at 09:06:51AM +1000, andrew wrote:
> On Sat, May 22, 2010 at 05:24:55PM +0200, Reimar Döffinger wrote:
> 
> > Ok, use revision 31190. Everyone happy now?
> > If you want me to write such a mail every day I'll have to automate it though.
> > Otherwise we have offered to grant distribution maintainers repo access so
> > they can generate branches for the versions they use, which certain would work
> > much better than their current approach of using ancient tarballs
> > and throw hundreds of patches on it (quite often probably not
> > verified by an MPlayer developer) to fix the security issues (well,
> > I hope they do fix them).
> 
> The latest Slackware ships with a reasonably recent svn release now
> that is completely unpatched and offers a choice with the installation
> script to build either with or without lame mp3, faac, AMR and dvdcss
> libraries. It is a nice compromise I think, although I build the
> latest svn myself :). For those who are interested:
> 
> http://slackware.osuosl.org/slackware-current/source/xap/MPlayer/MPlayer.SlackBuild
> 
> I am sure it would not be difficult for other distros to cobble
> something like this together.....

Well, some distros may want to stick to the same version for a longer time,
and it would indeed be good if they could reuse each others work,
which why the offer stands for repo access to create and maintain branches.
However obviously it is possible to do without this, at least up-to-date versions
are also available for Gentoo and Windows.
And compared to the level of testing these versions get anything we could do
would be quite inadequate, so whatever release we would do would not be of particularly
higher quality than what we do now.
And in general doing releases without _anyone_ who cares about releases being involved
seems pointless to me, I mean if someone really cares it shouldn't be so hard to find someone
who create a branch and makes sure that security patches are also applied to that one.