On 2006-12-23 22:47, John Andersen wrote:
On Saturday 23 December 2006 18:26, Darryl Gregorash wrote:
Your Mplayer was uninstalled because of legal reasons, and Novell/SuSE cannot do much about that, if they want to protect their asses and yours from some rather expensive lawsuits.
Actually, that is not exactly true.
Novell does not un-install software to protect 3rd party patents.
His Mplayer was un-installed because its dependencies could not be met. Its that simple. Leaving it there would result in an Mplayer that was horribly broken.
Quite true. I was very hasty in sending out my note, because I am growing very weary of seeing this same junk over and over again. As usually happens when one is overly hasty, the result was very misleading. However, I disagree that it's -quite- that simple. I didn't check the repository previously, but it seems that mplayer is not even included in the 10.2 distribution. Novell certainly is not in any legal position to distribute a great deal of the necessary support that mplayer needs, which is probably behind a decision not to include it at all. Mplayer is a very popular product, and I doubt/hope it would not have been excluded from SuSE for any other reason. The end result is, of course, still the same: An existing package cannot be upgraded, resulting in dependency conflicts, hence no alternative exists but to remove it.
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