[MPlayer-dev-eng] deterministic builds

[Adam Rice]

Quoting D Richard Felker III (dalias at aerifal.cx):
> No, we've made it very clear. There are two problems:
> 
> 1. MPlayer (G1)'s architecture does not like DVD menus. This probably
>    won't change.
> 2. The software (libdvdnav) does not provide a sufficiently general
>    api to support the way MPlayer wants to handle input streams.

Sorry, I didn't mean to troll. I wasn't criticising mplayer, just making a
joke. I have several DVDs with pictures than can only be accessed through the
menus, and back when Ogle came out this was a big issue for me. Now our house
has more DVD players than people, and I find my preferred player is mplayer
simply because I can skip all the crap.

> Yes. Right now I'm the one holding things up, because the new video
> layer isn't complete and it's key to everything else...

Forgive my skepticism, but I've seen a lot of free software projects that have
tried to do a G2 and died in the attempt. The version that everyone is using
stops being mantained, the next generation version develops behind closed
doors at a mercurial pace with nothing to show for it but a couple of
snapshots, and ultimately either someone comes along and forks the original,
or its userbase is poached by a completely new project.

> Typing "make -n install" should always output a _very_ small number of
> user-readable commands so the user can evaluate what will happen
> before doing it!

In an ideal world, yes. I love it when I type "make install" and it does
exactly two install commands. It's quick and transparent. But with modern
projects that install dozens of libraries and hundreds of icons, it becomes
increasingly unrealistic to expect that.

> Here's a good related read:
> http://www.pcug.org.au/~millerp/rmch/recu-make-cons-harm.html

That was very interesting, thankyou.

>                                       it pollutes the CVS repository
> with thousands of lines of patches, because autoconf _hard-codes_ line
> numbers into the script for error reporting/logging!

Ooh, I hate that. If I wanted hard-coded line numbers I'd program in BASIC!

Adam

-- 
Adam Rice -- adamrice at ntlworld.com -- Blackburn, Lancashire, England