Bug#579925: mplayer: built without gui support

[Sven Joachim]

Am 02.05.2010 um 19:43 schrieb Reinhard Tartler:

> On Sun, May 02, 2010 at 13:13:15 (CEST), Sven Joachim wrote:
>
>> Shouldn't such an important change as dropping the gui be at least
>> announced in NEWS.Debian to give the chance to bail out from the
>> upgrade?  This was not a pleasant experience for me. :-(
>
> This is more or less a compromise to bypass the NEW queue. In the next
> upload, we intend to add an new binary package 'mplayer-gui' that
> contains it. I can write some lines for NEWS.Debian. In any case, here
> is the current plan:
>
> ,----[proposed NEWS.Debian wording
> | The graphical version of mplayer (mplayer-gui, installed as
> | /usr/bin/gmplayer) has been moved to the 'mplayer-gui' package. It is
> | not installed by default, interested users need to install it manually.
> | 
> | On upgrades from earlier releases of debian, /usr/bin/gmplayer may be
> | removed from the system. Users can get it back by manually installing
> | the 'mplayer-gui' package.
> |
> | Please note that mplayer-gui is deprecated and effectively
> | unmaintained. Moreover, it is known to contain obvious bugs, some of
> | which are pretty hard to fix.  Both its upstream developers and the
> | Debian maintainers strongly advice against installing this package.
> | As a replacement, have a look at the smplayer package instead.
> `----

I just installed smplayer, it is quite nice -- much better than
gmplayer, anyway.  Probably mplayer should suggest it (and maybe other
frontends as alternatives).  BTW, smplayer couldn't quite grok mplayer's
version string and complained that it was too old, but that's a minor
problem.

Sven