[MPlayer-DOCS] letter to distro mplayer packagers?

[Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski]

Hi everyone,

On Sunday, 27 November 2005 at 19:54, Diego Biurrun wrote:
[...]
> 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.

Debian packaging has been a bit of a mystery to me, too. I even got into
an argument with one person in #mplayer over which packaging format was
better and I was convinced that the sources for a .deb always have to come
in 3 parts: the original source, a .dsc file and a gzipped 'diff -Nru' patch
containing all the patches and additional files. However, that person
told me it didn't have to be like this. After digging in Debian docs I was
able to confirm that. It seems that there is in fact an infrastructure for
maintaining separate independent patches for building .deb packages
and I very much wish somebody would make use of that. As far as I remember,
it is a bit more formalized than in RPM, but the benefits of easier
maintenance I think outweigh the trouble of transition.

> 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 in itself, but the packaging patch directly contains an outdated version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.

Indeed. AFAIR we've agreed on vo=xv being a good default, haven't we?
vo=xv,x11 may be better still.

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"