From: Sam Hocevar Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2006 11:15:54 +0200 To: mennucc1@debian.org Cc: Dariush Pietrzak , Jeroen van Wolffelaar Subject: Re: MPlayer packages in Debian On Mon, Sep 18, 2006, A Mennucc wrote: > > Also, now that > > they seem to have switched to SVN, generating the full changelog they > > they = ?? they = upstream (taken from the previous sentence) > > advertise in some files should be trivial. I think you should at least > > include this with your package, but of course having it upstream would > > be nicer. > > (please elaborate) The advertised full changelog can be retrieved with "svn log -v". > > I am also personally interested in getting MPlayer to dynamically > > link with or load the libraries I maintain upstream and/or in Debian > > (liba52, libmpeg2, libavcodec, libavformat, as well as libdvdcss that > > was removed from your tarball) to avoid code duplication and to avoid > > pathetic patches such as tremor/tremor.diff. > > It is a declared goal of MPlayer people not to dynamically link. > Dyn. code is slower, and the goal of mplayer is to be fast. This is totally off-topic. liba52, libmpeg2, libavcodec and libavformat development packages all provide static libraries that were not built with -fPIC. libdvdcss is not in Debian but has absolutely no performance drawback from using PIC. Performance is not a reason for having in-tree copies of those libraries. Anyways, are you able to quantify that claim, or are you just repeating what you heard? There is hardly any performance difference between PIC and non-PIC code on !x86 architectures. On x86 architectures, performance critical code uses extra registers such as MMX, SSE etc. that are not impacted by PIC and when %ebx is needed as a loop variable it can easily be pushed/popped, which is very cheap outside loops. Also, if MPlayer is supposed to be fast, why is it still single threaded and does not take advantage of today's multiple core CPUs? Moreover bigger binaries mean that several instances of the same program eat as times as much memory, which is not suitable for setups such as streaming servers. I have yet to see a benchmark that confirms those claims. Until then, I will have to call bullshit on them. Also, static linking of libraries that are packaged in Debian make it harder to handle security upgrades. > > Did you, as package > > maintainers, try to achieve that in any way? > > no Well, I think you should. > ps: sorry for the late reply It's all right, I have done worse :) -- Sam.