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. > > -- The best way to accelerate a computer running Windows is at 9.81 m/s² -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
