[MPlayer-DOCS] letter to distro mplayer packagers?

[Diego Biurrun]

Christian,

for some time I've been planning to write an email to you containing
a few notes about the MPlayer packages you make. Things did not start
quite the way I wished them to, but let us all try to make the best out
of this situation and cooperate in a constructive manner from now on.

The effort you make in creating and hosting MPlayer packages for Debian
is appreciated. However, they are not entirely without problems. I've
given face to face support support to some people having trouble with
MPlayer on Debian and decided to look more closely into the packaging
afterwards.

First off the package is somewhat unwieldy.  The patch that gets applied
is 268kb compressed, which is massive.  Among other things it contains a
uuencoded version of the MPlayer default skin, Blue.  Why this is done
the way it is done remains a mystery to me.

You install the example config file into /etc/mplayer/. This is not bad
in itself, but the packaging patch directly contains an outdated version
of the example config file. Plus, a few defaults are set wrongly. A
harmless-looking line like

vo=x11,

creates a lot of trouble for the user because this selects the
unaccelerated x11 video output driver that does not do scaling by
default. Thus people go into fullscreen mode and wonder why the screen
is black but an unscaled movie remains in the middle at original size.
We get reports about this all the time.

The defaults MPlayer uses have been carefully chosen, there should be
no need to ship more than the default config file where all entries are
commented out. To further complicate matters there are multiple copies
of the example config file scattered over the packaging patch.

You added quite a few mime-types to the mplayer.desktop file. This is
good. I took them all, added a few more and committed everything to CVS.
Since the mplayer.desktop file is also hard-coded into the packaging
patch, you may not pick this up automatically.

We gladly accept patches from packagers.  Unfortunately we have not been
getting any from you, Christian.  You apply many small patches to your
packages, yet AFAICT most of the problems they aim to fix are already
resolved in upstream CVS.

MPlayer includes infrastructure for building Debian packages in the
upstream sources, but it could be much improved.  I'd like to lift part
of your package for this purpose eventually.

Regards

Diego