dropping -gui flavor from mplayer package

[Reinhard Tartler]

On Sa, Jan 23, 2010 at 17:36:35 (CET), Benjamin Drung wrote:

> Am Samstag, den 23.01.2010, 16:12 +0100 schrieb Reinhard Tartler:
>> [ CC'ing Andrea as I'm not sure if you are actively reading our team
>>   lists. I haven't seen you active since quite some time ]
>> 
>> Hi folks,
>> 
>> A few weeks ago, fabrice and I discussed dropping the -gui variant from
>> the mplayer package. Currently the situation is this:
>> 
>>  - mplayer-nogui ships a copy of mplayer that does not depend on X11 and
>>    related libraries. It is the commongly used variant of mplayer
>> 
>>  - mplayer contains mplayer-gui, which is known to cause many problems
>>    that are known to upstream but they are not interested in fixing
>>    them. Have a look at the upstream archives and the bugs filed in
>>    launchpad against this
>> 
>>  - the 'mplayer' package ships a .desktop file with mime-type
>>    associations, which makes people use mplayer-gui from filemanagers
>>    like nautilus and become the impression that mplayer-gui was actually
>>    supposed to work.
>> 
>>  - there are various other really great 3rd party frontends for mplayer,
>>    smplayer seems to be most popular, but there are also others like
>>    kmplayer that work much better than the original mplayer-gui variant.
>> 
>> fabrice_sp and I discussed the possibility of dropping the mplayer-gui
>> variant and ship non-X11 version of mplayer only. If nobody objects, I
>> intend to merge the mplayer-nogui into the mplayer package, and provide
>> the nongui variant only. The next upload will probably close a large
>> amount of bugs in launchpad then.
>> 
>> If someone thinks that this was a bad idea, now would be a great time to
>> speak up!
>
> I am against dropping gmplayer (the gui for mplayer). 

So you are in favor of leaving a known broken package in the archive for
wich better alternatives exist and causes endless pain for users without
any hope for improvement of the situation? Can you please elaborate on
this opinion?

> The package names can be improved. Here are my suggestions:
>
> * mplayer should ship the previous mplayer-nogui package.
>
> * gmplayer should ship the gmplayer binary (previous mplayer package)

Fine with me, the naming was taken over from marillat. I generally agree
with this suggestion, because introducing a new name for the package
would make it a bit less visible. It would still be around, though.

I guess the 'normal' upgrade path would remove gmplayer by default and
have users explicitly install the package, right?


-- 
Gruesse/greetings,
Reinhard Tartler, KeyID 945348A4