[MPlayer-DOCS] letter to distro mplayer packagers?

[Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski]

Sorry for the crosspost, but I believe this is of interest to those
devs who don't read mplayer-docs, too.

On Saturday, 26 November 2005 at 15:52, compn wrote:
> has anyone sent a letter to all package maintainers asking them to follow the
> packages doc? or to get them to stop removing the mplayer version numbers?

I just did.

> e.g. users come into #mplayer:
> [09:05] <ProN00b> MPlayer dev-CVS--4.0.2
> [09:05] <ProN00b> thats my current version
> [09:05] <ProN00b> is it old ?
> [09:09] <ProN00b> i think so, its ubuntu's newest package
> 
> or just put the letter in the news section of mphq.
> could make it a comedy piece, like "top 10 things wrong with mplayer packages."

As expected from our favourite Christian Marillat (Cc'd), who is listed as
the maintainer.

I've just looked at the packaging and it's horrible. I don't know too much
about debian packaging, but it seems it requires dirty hacks to package
the skin, too. Either that, or Christian doesn't know how to make good
maintainable packages, though it may be thanks to others who modified this
package in Ubuntu: Christian Bjälevik and Sebastian Dröge (I'm Cc'ing
them).

They use a lot of --enable-* for things that should be left for
autodetection. They're using their own custom config.h and config.mak
(which I think is consistent with the previous observation). They patch
libdha to be static. They package codecs.conf(!). And their idea of telling
users that it's a Debian binary package is to change the "compiled with
runtime cpu detection" message to "compiled for debian".

And this... this is unparalleled stupidity:

--- mplayer-1.0-pre7cvs20050716.orig/version.h
+++ mplayer-1.0-pre7cvs20050716/version.h
@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+#define VERSION "dev-CVS--4.0.2"

We have no way of knowing if they really used gcc-4.0.2 to compile it and
which version it really is.

So please, guys, read our packaging guidelines at
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/tech/binary-packaging.txt .
I wish you would follow at least some of them, but if you really don't
want to, then at least modify the version string accordingly. Your comments
about the guidelines are most welcome, too.

Regards,
R.

-- 
MPlayer RPMs maintainer: http://rpm.greysector.net/mplayer/
"I am Grey. I stand between the candle and the star. We are Grey.
 We stand between the darkness ... and the light."
        -- Delenn in Grey Council in Babylon 5:"Babylon Squared"