A Question about packages Praises/Criticisms

[flebber]

Hi

For my question I am referring to https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Mageia_2_beta2

1) One query I notice that the Video packages included mplayer (including the GUIs gnome-mplayer, kmplayer, mplayer-gui and smplayer). I love my videos and the best thing about smplayer as set apart from the gnome and kmplayer is that SMplayer uses the improved mplayer2 libraries, will mageia2 use this?
Note I thought kmplayer(http://kmplayer.en.softonic.com/) was dead the developer now working on the windows only potplayer http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=148745 showing doom9 thread as developer website in Korean only.

2) Why are Ruby packages being kept back to Ruby 1.8.7 and Rails 2.3? Ruby 1.8.7 has had its EOL released and the current version of Rails is 3.2 which will be the last rails version to support the 1.8 series. Can't Mageia use 1.9.3-p125 by default?

3) Congratulations on introducing MariaDB great Work!!!

[doktor5000]

For smplayer, it builds against mplayer1. There are not much benefits for mplayer2, as our mplayer is built against latest system ffmpeg.
Also mplayer2 has dropped mencoder, i consider that a bug regression not to switch to it.

For Ruby, seems the ruby maintainer did not have time to work on his packages? May happen, remember we're alll volunteers doing this in our spare time ...

[flebber]

For smplayer, it builds against mplayer1. There are not much benefits for mplayer2, as our mplayer is built against latest system ffmpeg.
Also mplayer2 has dropped mencoder, i consider that a bug regression not to switch to it.

I guess the mplayer thing is a matter of opinion, I prefer mplayer2 for the better multithreading and the better matroska support, if I had a Nvidia card(I have ATI unfortuneately.) I would be hangin for the new mplayer2 improvements. They actually list not needing the ffmpeg tree as a major benefit of the upgrade http://www.mplayer2.org/comparison.html

For Ruby, seems the ruby maintainer did not have time to work on his packages? May happen, remember we're alll volunteers doing this in our spare time ...

I can appreciate the time factor, glad it wasn't a concious decision. I didn't realise this area needed help probably too late in the day for me to learn how to maintain and update these packages now.

[flebber]

If maintaining packages requires some assistance and someone is willing to guide me in how to do it I would be glad to help.

[doktor5000]

Check https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Becoming_a_Mageia_Packager if you want to help.

For mplayer2 it's quite a bit too late to ask for this, as we're already in freeze.
You should probably ask for this after Mageia 2 release on the mageia-dev mailing list.

[linuxoid]

For smplayer, it builds against mplayer1. There are not much benefits for mplayer2, as our mplayer is built against latest system ffmpeg.
Also mplayer2 has dropped mencoder, i consider that a bug regression not to switch to it.

For Ruby, seems the ruby maintainer did not have time to work on his packages? May happen, remember we're alll volunteers doing this in our spare time ...

smplayer has an options menu to allow you to choose what version of mplayer to use. This includes
mplayer2. I have used this on arch linux with no problem and arch even gives u an app-chooser(like the one for sunjava or openjdk java in some linux distros)

Why mplayer2? Simple. It is the only video player I have tried that allowed me to watch my huge High-definition mkv Terminator rip smoothly with no sound or video stutters. Windows media player allows this and we need one on linux to match that experience. In fairness I haven't tried the new version 2 of vlc so maybe it's up to par too.
I step forward to the packaging plate for this application.

[doktor5000]

You can simply use f.ex. vlc or xbmc for that, i can watch high definition MKVs without problems. You can also set up smplayer to use vdpau acceleration with mplayer, if your graphic cards supports that. Also windows media player doesn't play anything by default, as it doesn't have any video codecs other than for WMV videos, so that's a bad comparison.

If you want to contribute to the packaging team: https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Becoming_a_Mageia_Packager

[wilcal]

.....that allowed me to watch my huge High-definition mkv Terminator rip smoothly with no sound or video stutters....

DVD or BluRay rip?

[linuxoid]

BluRay.

Linux is about choice no?
I don't see this as a bad thing even if some of the other players may be able
to handle this. BTW this was on a very old laptop with intel graphics - so think of
what would be good for people with older machines.
Obviously the preintalled XP had codecs installed for media player.

[doktor5000]

We already had the discussion about mplayer and mplayer2, and switching to mplayer2 would mean dropping mencoder, because that's still not available. Also mplayer2 doesn't give many advantages. So actually mplayer2 offers less choice, also it can't coexist with mplayer1, as it uses same binary and directory names. For more information see maybe https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2611

[linuxoid]

Sorry but the last part simply isn't true.
mplayer2 installs by default as /usr/local/bin/mplayer
mplayer installs as /usr/bin/mplayer

As I said, a simple config chooser could let the user decide which version
to use, just as with sun java and openjdk.
Many people in Fedora and arch have switched to it but if you need mencoder then keep mplayer1.

[doktor5000]

Sorry but the last part simply isn't true.
mplayer2 installs by default as /usr/local/bin/mplayer
mplayer installs as /usr/bin/mplayer

No, you're mistaken here. /usr/local is intented by the FHS for local modifications to the installation, and it's also the default prefix if nothing is specified.
System-supplied packages must not use /usr/local, and there we have the problem - they will both get installed into default $PATH and both have the same names.
Not possible to solve this with some kind of chooser.

And as i've already told, there are no advantages when using mplayer2, as it only uses system ffmpeg libraries, which is effectively the same as our patched mplayer. But freel free to continue with your rant

[linuxoid]

I enjoy rants - doesn't everyone?

I was unaware you patched mplayer and will give it a try.
Is it multithreaded now?
I was also unaware of package policy. Of course if you compile it yourself(easy to do) then
it will install in /usr/local/bin