[MPlayer-dev-eng] Error when linking with libass support

[Uoti Urpala]

On Sun, 2006-06-18 at 18:14 +0400, Vladimir Mosgalin wrote:
>  On 2006.06.18 at 16:50:55 +0300, Uoti Urpala wrote next:
> > It seems to be part of freetype 2.1.10, current configure check is only
> > for 2.1.8 so that needs to be updated. Since it's only used in one place
> > disabling the functionality under older freetype might be possible but I
> > don't particularly like the idea of adding #ifdefs to support old
> > library versions.
> 
> 2.1.10? It's much too new. Why don't you look which freetype version
> is available for stable versions of most distributions? Requirement to

Debian stable has 2.1.7. This is older than the previous configure check
requirement of 2.1.8, so adding an #ifdef for just this symbol wouldn't
help. Both testing and unstable have 2.2.1.

> "download and compile the very latest version of XXX for feature YYY to
> work" was never among mplayer's characteristics, why start doing it now?

During the last year I remember at least Musepack support requiring a
library version that was released a day or two ago.

> Maybe it could be affordable if it was about some rare library, but
> freetype is known to break things on upgrades due to heavy changes in
> API - a lot of things are added/removed much too often. Probably there

If it's a library that changes a lot and you think your old programs
would break with a newer version of the library, then I think it's
unreasonable for you to expect that new programs designed to use the
current API would work with old versions of the library.

> is a reason why 2.1.10 isn't available in most distrubutions, too.

As mentioned above Debian testing has 2.2.1, so I do not believe there
are any fundamental issues that would mean versions above 2.1.7 should
be avoided.