Tuesday 22 January 2008, Thomas Bächler wrote: | I have been maintaining mplayer for a while now. Unfortunately, | during my absence mplayer had to be rebuilt by someone else. The | x86_64 version (built by Eric) is fine, but the i686 (built by | someone who doesn't know what the "Packager" option in | makepkg.conf is for) version is missing features (bug #9288). | | The mplayer build system sucks. Seriously, it is the worst idea | people have ever had, but the guys who are currently maintaining | it are proud of it (I had the pleasure of arguing with one of them | about autotools vs. mplayer during a two hour car trip last | summer). | | Here is the thing: | In autotools, you can use --enable-FOO to force configure to | enable a feature. However, configure still checks if all libraries | and headers are present and will add the needed options to gcc, or | abort if a check fails. | | In mplayer, --enable-FOO forces the build system to enable a | feature, but also skips all checks and doesn't add any options to | the compiler, thus making 'make' fail unless you modify Makefiles | by hand. This is not only unintuitive but also completely | inconsistent with the way autotools work. The only way to properly | enable a feature in mplayer is to put no --enable or --disable | flag in and hope that configure's autodetection detects it | properly. And of course you have to check if everything went fine | after configure finished by reading the output summary. I don't | have to tell you that this is very distributior-unfriendly. | | Since there is no way to force mplayer's configure to abort if | something we want is missing, we must have the necessary | makedepends listed - which we don't, as they are not easy to | determine. The only way to properly build mplayer is to watch | everything it does carefully and abort if something is wrong. | | For a while, a "we need clean build chroots so that our packages | are not corrupted" attitude has spread, and this is exactly what | broke mplayer (I have no idea which makedepend may be missing | though). | | So please, unless you know exactly what you are doing and have | much time to check everything, don't build mplayer! or any other package you are not familiar with. or please do NOT take any dependencies out just to have a clean list that coresponds to namcap output. amen ;) - D -- .·´¯`·.¸.·´¯`·.¸¸.·´¯`·.¸.·´¯`·.¸.·´¯`·.¸.·´¯`·.¸¸.·´ ° ° ° ° ° ° ><((((º> ° ° ° ° ° <º)))>< <º)))><