dropping -gui flavor from mplayer package

[fabrice]

Hi,

Reinhard Tartler escribió:
>>> 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). 

Why keeping a package that upstream is not maintaining?

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

IMHO, the upgrade should keep some gui installed: so perhaps we should
have a recommends, or suggest, on smplayer in mplayer package, so the
upgrade path would be:
- mplayer -> smplayer
- mplayer-nogui -> mplayer ? Not sure it's a good idea to actually have
the same package name with different content, and a strange upgrade path


I think we should avoid "I don't have a mplayer gui anymore" bug reports.

My 2 cents,

Fabrice