[Fedora-legal-list] Reasons for not including MPlayer in main repository?

[Tom "spot" Callaway]

On 10/14/2010 03:30 PM, Stefan Parviainen wrote:
> On Thursday, October 14, 2010 05:49:53 pm Tom "spot" Callaway wrote:
>> I cannot provide you a list of formats that are problematic.
>>
>> The problem with mplayer is that it is structured in such a way that is
>> not modular, at least not in a way that we could in Fedora package
>> support for known safe formats, such as Ogg Vorbis/Theora, without
>> conflicting with an rpmfusion package that contains potentially
>> problematic formats.
> 
> Why exactly would it be a problem to conflict with the rpmfusion package 
> (honest question)? Also, could the rpmfusion people not simply give their 
> package a higher priority than the one in the Fedora repos? IIRC this is how 
> Debian does it.

Conflicts cause unnecessary confusion for end-users, and it is a rule
established by rpmfusion. Playing games with package priority simply
leads to confusion as versions change and causes end user expectations
to not be met.

> I'm interested in packaging a stripped version of mplayer, but I feel it would 
> be a waste of time if any package is refused due to legal reasons anyway. I 
> would, therefore, feel more comfortable if any legal issues could be resolved 
> before I start work on packaging. If a list of "bad" formats can not be given, 
> how about a list of "known good" ones? At least the ones currently included in 
> GStreamer should be OK, right?

Given that mplayer is already available in rpmfusion, I do not think
there is any merit in packaging a stripped version in Fedora, as it
would cause a conflict with rpmfusion.

I would argue that your energy might be better spent on properly
modularizing the codec support in mplayer, but having dealt with that
upstream in the past, I suspect your energy might be better spent not
working on mplayer at all.

~spot