Comment 60 for bug 85751

I'm the creator of DeVeDe and the "patch" based in version 0.99Pre8 for Mplayer/Mencoder.

I can understand that people just wants a system that "simply works", but maybe we don't have the right perspective about this problem.

The current stable version for Mplayer/Mencoder is 1.0rc1. This version is exactly the same available in both Feisty and Gutsy. This version has this unfortunate bug, both the Ubuntu package and the official tar.gz file from www.mplayerhq.hu. Since the release of this version, Mplayer/Mencoder developers have been working in the CVS and fixed this bug there. Unfortunately in the CVS are a lot of changes, new capabilities and more, and the code isn't considered stable. This means that the package maintainer can't take the CVS version and use it to create the Gutsy package, because is very probable that it has even more bugs than the current version. An example: before using the old 0.99pre8 version in my patch, I used the CVS code. Yes, this bug was fixed, but people trying to create PAL DVDs found that, in some cases, the final picture was in black&white!!!!! When trying to fix the old bug, a new one was added. That's why I decided to go back and use the old 0.99Pre8 version. It was much more tested and stable.

A package maintainer must be very careful with these things, and that's why he don't want to use the current CVS version. And as he told some messages ago, the specific patch to fix this bug is somewhere in the CVS history, and is very complex to find and isolate it, to warrant that there are no new bugs, so I suppose he is waiting for a new stable release of Mplayer/Mencoder (1.0rc2, I suppose), to minimize the possibles regressions. And I suppose that he can't go back to the old 0.99pre8 because to do that he would use a trick to cheat APT and force it to install a lower version.

So please, stop with these attacks to the maintainer. I'm sure he is trying to do its work the best he can.