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