I’m really starting to dislike me writing blog posts about stuff that I bump in portage, and hopefully this will be the last one. Actually the only reason I’m doing this one is because I want to get the ebuild tested and as many bugs fleshed out as I can.
I started working on an ebuild for an SVN snapshot of MPlayer about a few weeks ago. Upstream doesn’t do point releases very often, which is fine since they provide daily snapshots and they are pretty stable anyway. It does make it a little hard on people like me though who are sometimes wanting something a little more recent.
Well, I think the complexity and time it took to put this thing together beat that desire out of me for a while. MPlayer in itself is a beast, though a lovable wonderful one, and writing an ebuild for it is not the easiest thing in the world. In fact, this was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to put together. I have to give a lot of thanks to Lu (lu_zero) who not only gave me the green light to go through with this crazy idea, but mentored me quite a bit on what I was doing wrong and how to fix it.
I really don’t feel like going into details, so I’ll just summarize and say that there’s a new version in the portage tree, and it adds lots of use flags and should fix a lot of bugs. If you do find problems with the ebuild, please comment about it in this forum post and I’ll try to take a look at it. I have spent at least a combined total of 20 hours working on this ebuild, and I want it to be nice and clean. Well, that, and I want to move onto other stuff, too. 🙂
So, lemme know if you find any problems. Thanks, guys.
Thank you very much your work is appreciated – other people want more recent version too.