Bug#649153: Please provide a 'nogui' package

[Reimar Döffinger]

On Fri, Nov 18, 2011 at 03:45:02PM +0100, Reinhard Tartler wrote:
> On Fr, Nov 18, 2011 at 11:13:16 (CET), Daniel Baumann wrote:
> 
> > Package: mplayer
> > Severity: wishlist
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > it would be nice if you could split the mplayer package and provide a
> > mplayer-nogui (or whatever name you find suitable) that provides an
> > mplayer not linked against the whole xorg related stack (similar what
> > marillat did).
> >
> > having a 'nogui' package is very usefull on server where we e.g. use
> > mplayer in the backend to create preview thumbnails of videos that users
> > uploaded, and obviously do not want to pull in the whole of x libraries.
> 
> The "nogui" variant of mplayer is called 'mplayer' in Debian. The
> gmplayer frontend used to be packaged as 'mplayer-gui'. I had to disable
> it because it failed to build against the system libswscale.so in the
> past.
> 
> The X11 dependencies that you see are because of video output (vo)
> modules that use X11 libraries, such as xv, opengl, x11, etc.
> 
> I fear there is little that can be done about this. And even the
> marillat mplayer-nogui package contains a lot of X11 related
> dependencies:

I think there are -nox package variants for some, the same _could_
be done for MPlayer (configure --disable-x11 I hope would work,
though it might still pull it in indirectly e.g. via SDL and
OpenGL-via-SDL so it might be some effort).
Whether it's a good idea, particularly since I am afraid that setup
is probably not tested all as much I'll leave to you...