[arch-dev-public] Building mplayer
Damir Perisa
damir.perisa at solnet.ch
Tue Jan 22 12:20:36 EST 2008
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
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