mplayer from SVN

[Peter Jeremy]

On 2009-Dec-28 18:25:41 +0100, Michal Varga <varga.michal at gmail.com> wrote:
>Does anybody know why are we still using 3-year old version?

The MPlayer Project no longer do "releases".  Instead they only offer
daily snapshots of their SVN repo.  It appears that the maintainer of
the MPlayer port has adopted a policy of waiting for an "official"
release before updating the port.

> I could hardly believe the reason is only that
>upstream decided to stop releasing tarballs, after all, this never
>stopped anybody in creating -devel ports.

In most cases, the -devel ports relate to specific pre-release versions
of a codebase and are available as a versioned distribution file.

The FreeBSD ports system is designed around distfiles with fixed, known
content.  This is not compatible with a mplayer-export-snapshot.tar.bz2
that changes daily.

If someone wanted to update MPlayer to an SVN version (either by updating
the existing mplayer port or by creating a new mplayer-svn port), they
would need to:
- grab a copy of MPlayer from http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html
- create/update suitable Makefile with supported options/dependencies
  (the existing Makefiles would make a good start)
- Create FreeBSD-specific patches if required.
- Build and test mplayer with a variety of options on a variety of platforms
- Create pkg-plist listing everything that is installed
- Arrange for the distfile to be hosted somewhere (eg freebsd.org)
- Submit normal ports PR.

This is basically the same as any other port except for the requirement
to host the distfile.

-- 
Peter Jeremy
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