[MPlayer-users] Issue playing opus audio

[Uoti Urpala]

On Mon, 2016-11-14 at 12:54 +0100, wm4 wrote:
> Maybe they should just have made "mplayer" from the transition package
> show an error message, with suggestions which packages can be installed
> to get alternative players...

Making a transitional package that only tells the user they need to
manually switch to something else could make sense for users who
manually installed that player specifically. However, that's quite
likely not even the majority of installs. Several other packages had at
least a "Recommends" dependency on mplayer2. Until all such packages
have been removed from the user's system or updated to versions which
have different dependencies, there needs to be a package that satisfies
those dependencies. Having the transitional package for that use just
show an error would make little sense - the most likely way the
depending packages will deal with the removal of the mplayer2 package
(or the way they already have dealt with that in newer package
versions) is switching the dependency to mpv, and the sane thing for
the transitional package to do is to create the same end result of
having mpv installed even if the depending-on packages haven't been
updated yet.

I think the main reason for the symlink is possible direct functional
dependencies (as opposed to just recommending that the system has a
player available so the user can start it by whatever means he
prefers). The symlink will likely work for most cases where a program
launches a player directly (at least I don't know of cases that would
use tricky options likely to have changed incompatibly outside of
something like SMPlayer, and trying to keep using old package versions
of that would likely not work anyway).