[MPlayer-users] When will there be a new release?

[Reimar Döffinger]

On Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 05:29:35AM -0700, Jason Garrett-Glaser wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 5:22 AM, Manuel Reimer
> <Manuel.Spam at nurfuerspam.de> wrote:
> > Jason Garrett-Glaser wrote:
> >> Moreso, if we wait long enough, the distros will eventually be forced
> >> to stop packaging ancient versions of mplayer.  If we release now,
> >> we'll have to prolong the cycle by another 2-3 years yet again.
> >
> > No, they will see that mplayer does no longer publish new releases,
> > consider the project to be death and port over to another player or backend.
> 
> By that logic no distro would include ffmpeg, since ffmpeg doesn't
> publish new releases, so clearly the project must be dead.
> 
> Except... no.

Ideally the distros would update MPlayer at the same time as libavcodec,
since more and more link against dynamic libav* and we certainly have no
intentions of supporting combinations of libav* and MPlayer from
different dates.
In that aspect, they are already running more "unstable" MPlayer version
than if they just took latest SVN.
Nevertheless, getting something really stable is quite an effort and I
think it would work much better if the packagers synchronize among each
other - so far my impression is that each distro works on their own with
little to no communication.
In a perfect world, a "MPlayer release manager" should mostly do the job
of beating the distro packagers to work together and create one or more
shared tarballs they maintain together, including the patches they apply
and base their binaries on.

Greetings,
Reimar Döffinger