Re: ximian patches

[Pavel Roskin <proski gnu org>]

Hello!

> Yup, I'd agree too that mplayer is one of the best video player out
> there, much better than the xanim, gtv etc...

Maybe you don't understand the problem.  It's easy to support alternate
commands if all of them (except the last one) will almost always return
code 0.  So if we get something else, it usally means that the command is
missing or failed completely, so we can try the next command.  This is
what mc does for MS-Word documents:

regex/\.([Dd]o[ct]|DO[CT]|[Ww]ri|WRI)$
        View=%view{ascii} catdoc -w %f || word2x -f text %f - || strings %f

Even if catdoc exists and fails, it's just fine to try word2x, because it 
may have some chances to succeed.  And if both fail, we always have 
strings, which should always work.

We cannot do this with video players.  A player can crash in the middle of
stream on a broken frame.  We shouldn't start another player that would
play from the beginning - if would be very annoying for those who have
both players.

This means that without changes in the code, the only solution is to 
comment out xanim.  This also means that the users who have xanim but not 
mplayer will find after upgrade that they have to edit the extension file 
to restore the functionality they had.

Compile time detection is not a solution - most users don't compile their 
software.

Perhaps the best solution would be to allow more than one Open entry and
make mc select the best of them based on environment (running in X or
not), presence of some executables in PATH and possibly other factors.

A patch was posted in this list that introduces XOpen - a variant of Open
that works in X11.  I haven't seen any discussion about this patch.  It's
a much more generic approach, but it still doesn't include check for PATH.

Recommended reading:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/misc.html#BIKESHED-PAINTING

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin