[MPlayer-users] Stupid "programmer" tricks

[Rich Felker]

On Wed, Jan 16, 2008 at 01:10:18AM -0500, john q public wrote:
> A while back (12-20-07) I tried to build rc2. As a LFS user I was bit 
> disturbed by the
> "your distro is old" type replies to failed builds. It so happens my 

I suspect the intended meaning was not "your distro is too old" but
rather "your system is seriously non-posix-conformant and we're not
going to bend over backwards to add workarounds when you can just fix
your system instead".

> "distro" isn't a plug
> and play affair. Maybe it should be as I waste a lot of time but there 
> you have it.
> That said it so happens that when I:
> 
> 1. Installed the lastest giflib
> visited http://sources.redhat.com/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/libc/?cvsroot=glibc 
> and then
>    2. Replaced /usr/include/netinet/in.h with rev 1.24
>    3. Replaced /usr/include/arpa/inet.h with rev 1.14 (this is using 
> glib 2.0)
> 
> For whatever reason I used GCC 4.2.2 to compile this Frankenstein horror.

Replacing individual headers in glibc without also replacing the other
headers they recursively include, etc., does sound like a Frankenstein
horror. I'm surprised it works at all. By the way how old is your
glibc?? Maybe the problem is that you installed a buggy or
experimental glibc version when you build your LFS, because even
10-year-old stable glibc works fine for building MPlayer.

> It all compiled very nicely. Do I think this was a sensible thing to do? 
> No.
> Will I be happy if I have a functional MPlayer? Yes.
> Clearly its time to leave the stone age and rebuild my system but its 
> not a five minute
> job. Meanwhile I'm proud of my efforts to hang on to my beloved but all 
> too old LFS
> system.

Did you get MPlayer to build successfully, or not? If not you might
try figuring out what's wrong with your headers and manually fixing
them, though reading glibc headers is about as pleasant as removing
your eyeballs with a spoon..

Rich