Bug#1005899: mplayer: should not release with bookworm

[Sebastian Ramacher]

Source: mplayer
Version: 2:1.4+ds1-3
Severity: serious
X-Debbugs-Cc: sram...@debian.org
Tags: sid bookworm

Let's stop pretending that mplayer is maintained. The upstream mailing
list infrastructure is gone and development has been minimal over the
last couple of months and years. So I think we should not include
mplayer in bookworm. mpv is a worthy replacement for mplayer.

Cheers
--
Sebastian Ramacher

[Reimar Döffinger]

> On 16 Feb 2022, at 23:25, Sebastian Ramacher <sram...@debian.org> wrote:
>
> Let's stop pretending that mplayer is maintained.

What is your criteria for "maintained"? In Debian or upstream? Upstream issues are still addressed from time to time, there are still several people around that can address issues, in particular security issues.

> The upstream mailing
> list infrastructure is gone

I have absolutely no idea why you claim that.
It's there and working.

> and development has been minimal over the
> last couple of months and years.

It's mostly in maintenance mode I guess.
There might be Debian users who don't mind their software changing radically as long as it keeps doing what they've used it for the previous years...

> So I think we should not include
> mplayer in bookworm. mpv is a worthy replacement for mplayer.

Possibly, though it's not a drop-in replacement (different command-line) and supposedly it aims more at modern computers, so might not be so great a replacement for legacy hardware.

Best regards,
Reimar Döffinger

[Sebastian Ramacher]

On 2022-02-17 19:13:08 +0100, Reimar Döffinger wrote:
>
> > On 16 Feb 2022, at 23:25, Sebastian Ramacher <sram...@debian.org> wrote:
> >
> > Let's stop pretending that mplayer is maintained.
>
> What is your criteria for "maintained"? In Debian or upstream? Upstream issues are still addressed from time to time, there are still several people around that can address issues, in particular security issues.

It's definitely not maintained in Debian. Looking at the recent history
of mplayer uploads, I did most of them without any bug triaging. So
that's not what I would consider mplaer being maintained.

If you want to pick up maintenance of mplayer in Debian, please feel
free do that.

> > The upstream mailing
> > list infrastructure is gone
>
> I have absolutely no idea why you claim that.
> It's there and working.

Yesterday evening lists.mplayerhq.hu failed to resolve. Otherwise I
would have forwarded the build failure with ffmpeg 5.0. In the end, this
will need to be fixed for bookworm.

Cheers

>
> > and development has been minimal over the
> > last couple of months and years.
>
> It's mostly in maintenance mode I guess.
> There might be Debian users who don't mind their software changing radically as long as it keeps doing what they've used it for the previous years...
>
> > So I think we should not include
> > mplayer in bookworm. mpv is a worthy replacement for mplayer.
>
> Possibly, though it's not a drop-in replacement (different command-line) and supposedly it aims more at modern computers, so might not be so great a replacement for legacy hardware.
>
> Best regards,
> Reimar Döffinger

--
Sebastian Ramacher

[Reimar Döffinger]

On Thu, Feb 17, 2022 at 08:45:59PM +0100, Sebastian Ramacher wrote:
> On 2022-02-17 19:13:08 +0100, Reimar Döffinger wrote:
> >
> > > On 16 Feb 2022, at 23:25, Sebastian Ramacher <sram...@debian.org> wrote:
> > >
> > > Let's stop pretending that mplayer is maintained.
> >
> > What is your criteria for "maintained"? In Debian or upstream? Upstream issues are still addressed from time to time, there are still several people around that can address issues, in particular security issues.
>
> It's definitely not maintained in Debian. Looking at the recent history
> of mplayer uploads, I did most of them without any bug triaging. So
> that's not what I would consider mplaer being maintained.

As to the bugs, I have looked through them from time to time and they
all looked outdated, were not reproducible or definitely not relevant
anymore (like G3 PowerPC).
I didn't want to meddle with them beyond a quick check as I don't
know much about the process.

> If you want to pick up maintenance of mplayer in Debian, please feel
> free do that.

I asked one person with at least some knowledge about all that,
but they seemed to think that Debian requirements
are too high relative to the time they have available.

> > > The upstream mailing
> > > list infrastructure is gone
> >
> > I have absolutely no idea why you claim that.
> > It's there and working.
>
> Yesterday evening lists.mplayerhq.hu failed to resolve. Otherwise I
> would have forwarded the build failure with ffmpeg 5.0. In the end, this
> will need to be fixed for bookworm.

Compilation with FFmpeg 5.0 has been fixed since a while in our repo.
Finally we've also built the release packages, though not done the final
steps for releasing yet (download links etc).
http://mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/MPlayer-1.5.tar.xz
is the release that supports FFmpeg 5.0

[Diederik de Haas]

On 16 Feb 2022 23:25:00 +0100 Sebastian Ramacher <sram...@debian.org> wrote:
> Source: mplayer
> Version: 2:1.4+ds1-3
> Severity: serious

> Tags: sid bookworm

>
> I think we should not include mplayer in bookworm.
> mpv is a worthy replacement for mplayer.

I do use mpv to play ~ all my video files, but I also wrote the following in
January of *2022* (in ~/docs/Multimedia.md):

Apparently you can dump the video files belonging to one episode using VLC, but
that was rather cumbersome and it wasn't very clear to me what it did or what
I should do.
Luckily, ``mplayer`` is (still) packaged for Debian and with that, one can
dump a whole episode into a single VOB file:
``$ mplayer dvd://2 -dvd-device ALIAS_SEASON_1D1.iso -v -dumpstream -dumpfile
S01E02.vob``
The value after ``dvd://`` is the Title number that ``lsdvd`` showed us
earlier.


So I'm glad that several people indicated they wanted to improve mplayer in
Debian and I'll try to 'chip in' when I have some free time.

Cheers,
Diederik

[Lorenzo]

Hi Sebastian,

Could you please clarify if this package should be maintained inside the
Debian-Multimedia Team or outside? I.e. an uploader or a new maintainer?

Regards,
Lorenzo