Dump Crossover (for a better video system with linux)

[Dustin Mollo]

Allow me to clarify my comments from the earlier email.

First, no - I'm not looking for RPM's for all of this stuff.  I could care
less, to be honest.  Sure, they're nice, but if I really want to run
something, I'm willing to compile by hand and install.

As for the snob comments, IMHO, it doesn't serve our community or our cause
(*gasp* did I just say "cause"?!) to limit folks by only providing items
that prefer which platform they run on.  For instance - I went to the site
error mentioned hoping to find info on how I could grab source and get all
this to compile myself without relying on the .deb files.  No such luck. 
What this left me with was to track down each individual package and figure
out how it all plays together.  This guy already did all of that work and
then went and obscured it into .deb packages.  It would seem trivial to also
write down what he did to make it all work together (and to explain what the
.diff's are in the source area) so that a broader set of Linux folks could
take advantage of his work and promote the good word.

As for the mplayer folks prefering one platform over another, I have no
sympathy for them when it comes to them "requiring" one to run one distro
over another.  What they should be doing, again, IMHO, is requiring one to
be running glibc version blah dot blah and XFree86 blah dot blah with driver
zed-zed-alpha.  I've broken distro-distributed bits before in the name of
making an app work simply because I wanted it that bad.  This follows my
idea about how commercial vendors should be providing software for Linux. 
Sure - they can say you need to be running distro X, version Y and they'll
support you, but it seems like they should do you the favor of telling you
which libraries and other low-lever things they require should you want to
strike out on your own and run their product (unsupported of course) on a
distro that they don't mention.

At this time I should also point out that my original email might have been
more flame-y than I had intended it.  I also should point out that I wasn't
flamin error, and if anyone thought that, I appologize.  This is just one of
those topics I've long been sensitive about.

-Dustin

On Wed, Jan 15, 2003 at 05:19:52PM -0800, troy wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 15, 2003 at 04:03:09PM -0800, Dustin Mollo wrote:
> > That's great.  So now we've gone from being called operating system
> > snobs to Linux distribution snobs.  What an improvement!
> > 
> > Sheesh...
> 
> Are you perhaps responding to the mplayer developers being kinda
> snobbish?  Those guys have a deserved reputation for bitching about
> unsupported 'crappy' distro's and compilers and being jerks about it at
> the same time.  But this guy, (Marillat) just put out some nice deb's.
> I don't think (s)he's under any obligation to make packages for other
> package management systems.
> 
> No, I'm not ungrateful for their work, but they (mplayer developers)
> *do* qualify as snobs!
> 
> BTW, mplayer isn't /that/ hard to build from source any more.  Although
> it does take some editing of the Makefile if you're using an
> "unsupported / crappy" compiler.
> 
> Also, freshrpms.net has some rpm's for mplayer (and other stuff
> too)  
> 
> And thanks for the pointer, Mr. error.  It's nice to have a .deb feed for
> this stuff!  Mplayer is very cool software!
> 
> -troy