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

[Rashkae]

Reimar Döffinger wrote:

> 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.
> 

Wouldn't you get the same effect if once every 6 months or so Mplayer
created  tar ball from svn and gave it a version number?  I understand
that there will never be a 'stable version with all fixes backported,'
but surely if Mplayer took the initiative of creating the reference
points, then the distro packagers can do their thing and more or less be
in sync...

Otherwise, if you really expect distros to take svn, they have to create
their own number versions, (so you'll have Redhat Mplayer 1.0.2 and
Ubuntu Mplayer 1.0.2, but the source tarball will be different depending
on they day they copied svn).  It also makes patching these versions
different because each distro will have to create patches based on the
day they copied svn, whereas if there were upstream version reference
numbers, a fix for a bug in Mplayer 1.0.2 could be applied to each distro.