[clue-tech] mozilla-mplayer

[Nate Duehr]

On May 27, 2009, at 8:41 PM, David L. Anselmi wrote:

> Collins Richey wrote:
>> FYI,
>> If any of you are using mplayer on debian (iceweasel of course), you
>> might have noticed that any attempt to view a movie trailer results  
>> in
>> an immediate segfault and crash of iceweasel. I noticed this some  
>> time
>> back and hoped that it might be fixed by maintenance, but that was  
>> two
>> weeks back and no such luck.
>
> Does this help? http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi? 
> bug=527293
>
> apple.com/trailers works for me.


It's kinda ironic you picked that site to test with, isn't it?  ;-)

(If you don't see the humor, never mind...)


>> In typical FOSS fashion, the gurus-that-be have decided to abandon
>> mozilla-mplayer, and the replacement is called gecko-mediaplayer.
>> Said package drags in (sigh! typical) a bunch of gnome crepe but at
>> least it works.
>
> The Debian package is deprecated (but still there) because upstream  
> abandoned it.  Perhaps he died.  In FOSS fashion, just like in  
> corporate monopoly fashion, someone decided to stop doing voluntary  
> work that was useful to you.


But it happens VERY often.  More often than commercial vendors stop  
supporting their older applications without a migration path, I'd  
contend.  But I can't prove it empirically.

I haven't seen a commercial OS suddenly fail to play media after an  
automated OS upgrade yet, ON PURPOSE though.  That's pretty bad  
behavior.


> I understand your frustration.  But poking FOSS in the eye hardly  
> seems just.  I don't understand why you want to blame that for your  
> problem.


It's ENTIRELY just.  Dropping support for something that works just  
because ONE volunteer disappeared shows just how fragile Linux  
distributions really are.

Granted it also shows how spread thin the developers are, but you  
know... if there weren't a new distro for everyone's whim, that might  
not be such a problem.  I still believe developers by nature would  
rather reinvent the wheel and make a new distro than to work on an  
"old" distro to make it meet better/stronger *requirements* for  
upgrades never breaking things, etc...


> You could ask the Debian maintainer or the upstream why it was  
> abandoned.


Or grab an OS that won't be dropping support for playing online media  
without warning and use that instead... which is what MOST folks do,  
but Linux folk (myself included) somehow want to convince them that  
Linux is somehow "better".  It's not.  And our impression as techies  
isn't accurate for most users.


> Are the gnome dependencies really that big a deal?  Otherwise it  
> looks like gecko-mediaplayer is a pretty close replacement.


I have no comment on this one... bloatware is rampant on all OS's and  
platforms...

Linux and the Unix philosophy disappeared at the advent of the GUI,  
and stopped trying to be small and lean, years ago.

The major "competitors" in the Linux GUI world are both massively  
bloated and don't run any faster, really, on modern hardware than the  
desktops of the commercial OS's, as far as I can see.  Maybe rightly  
so with drive space being the price it is.

--
Nate Duehr
nate at natetech.com