[MPlayer-DOCS] [RFC] Binary packaging guidelines

[The Wanderer]

Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski wrote:

> About this document
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> With the release of MPlayer 0.90pre9 all licensing issues have been
> eliminated and all code is licensed under the GPL. This allows
> creating and distributing binary packages.

"creation and distribution" (possibly preceded by "the" and followed by
"of").

> Although this was discouraged by some of the developers, the users'
> need for ready-to-use binary packages was substantial and many
> packagers created them. Unfortunately, many of now available packages
> are crippled, including their own obsolete config files

"include"; either that or this needs rephrasing to indicate that "one of
the ways in which the packages are crippled is that"....

> or are mispackaged in some other way. This document aims to establish
> a common set of packaging guidelines so that official binary packages
> for other Linux distributions and other operating systems can be
> maintained.

"other Linux distributions" - other than what? If you mean "other than
my own RPM distribution", then that should I think be explicitly
specified. If not, I'd suggest using "various" instead of "other".

> Conventions
> ~~~~~~~~~~~
> Whenever you see "MUST", it means that following the mentioned
> guideline is required. Whenever you see "SHOULD", it means that
> following the guideline is highly recommended, but is not required,
> if necessary.

The "if necessary" seems a little odd to me. I'd either drop it or move
it to before "is not required".

> Including other features, like LIVE.COM streaming or JACK support is
> acceptable, but they SHOULD be build-time configurable, with default
> build configuration containing the above set.

Missing comma after "support". That makes the sentence as a whole overly
comma-heavy; I'd suggest splitting it with a semicolon after
"acceptable", and using "They SHOULD, however, be build-time
configurable" or some similar construction.

> Compilation
> ~~~~~~~~~~~
> While it is acceptable to provide packages optimized for specific
> CPUs You MUST provide at least one "lowest common denominator"
> package set that will work on all CPUs.

"specific CPUs, you MUST" - capitalization and comma issue. (This looks
like a remnant of a time when the above was split into two sentences.)

> Make sure your source package can be rebuilt without hand-editing on
> any system with the same distribution installed. Remember to disable
> (--disable-xxx) any optional features, because MPlayer's configure
> script autodetects most of them. This ensures that binary package
> builds are deterministic. That is, provided they have at least the
> required development packages installed, two different people using
> the same distribution will get binaries with the same dependencies.

I don't like beginning a sentence with "That is,"; I'd suggest joining
it to the previous sentence with a double-hypen, i.e., "are
deterministic -- that is, provided they", et cetera.

I'd thought I'd seen more problems than that, but they don't appear to
have popped out at me, so I suppose they must either have been my
imagination or have not been so bad after all. ^_^

-- 
       The Wanderer

Warning: Simply because I argue an issue does not mean I agree with any
side of it.

A government exists to serve its citizens, not to control them.