On Wed, 2010-05-19 at 10:55 +0100, Tom Evans wrote: > As a heavy user of mplayer with vdpau, I have to use the git fork of > mplayer to get smooth playback with vdpau. It makes me insanely angry > that this code isn't merged back to svn, that I have to use a non > official repo, Why do you care about those? Determining "officialness" is arbitrary anyway. If everyone agreed that the git repo is official, or a copy of its contents was committed to svn so you could get the same code from there, would that really somehow improve things for you? Trying to merge things to svn would make little sense technically; there are too many changes in git for that, and the git tree already works. Almost any possible problem someone could find with the current git code would be better fixed by improving the git repo rather than by trying to move its features to svn. > that I have to use a non standard build system that is > built on lots of magic (autoconf + python scripts? I mean really.) First note that you don't have to use those parts if you don't want to. The mplayer-build repo is an extra convenience wrapper to build ffmpeg or ffmpeg-mt and libass. If you build or already have suitable versions of those libraries installed on the system then you can build MPlayer against them without ever touching the mplayer-build repo. Second, would there be some actual problem even if you did have to use those scripts? They seem to work fine for most users. Apparently you dislike them for some reason, but it's not clear whether that is based on anything substantial. Also note that nothing in MPlayer or the build repo part themselves uses autoconf; only the libass build system uses it (if you want "standard" wouldn't autoconf be pretty much match that anyway?). And if the build repo scripts were something like shell instead they'd be much less robust. > There is no point in having two separate repositories for this work, > and from my point of view, it seems like it is ego rather than any > technical issue that keeps the two separate. I don't see technical justification why having two repositories would be necessary either. What I wrote about the respos earlier in http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mplayer-users/2009-December/078521.html should still be mostly valid.