return of the mpalyer package?!

[Miguel A. Colón Vélez]

> Yes, I'm still interested in joining the team.  The most important thing
> to me here is that mplayer be available in debian and that there be
> support behind it.  Toward that end, I believe I can contribute.

Sounds good.

> Regarding process, I have a couple grievances I want to air.
>
> 1. I did *not* know that anything was being worked on, and I apologize
>    for the duplicate effort.  I tried (several times, actually) to
>    contact you, and I received no reply either on IRC (which is how you
>    contacted me) or to my mail to the list (which is what your wiki says
>    I'm supposed to do to join the team).  Therefore, I assumed that
>    there was no work being done, since you had offered cooperation.  It
>    saddens me that the default response is to declare me hostile rather
>    than out of the loop.
>
> 2. Further, there has been an RFE/ITP bug open for mplayer+mencoder
>    since date -d 'Fri, 03 Oct 2014 01:08:23 +0200'.  It is number
>    763826.  This is my first attempt at maintaining a package and I am
>    not overly familiar with the process, but my understanding is that
>    the workflow goes RFE->ITP->package upload, in rough terms.  I
>    announced intent to package (and set bug status as such) on date -d
>    'Wed, 12 Nov 2014 16:58:51 -0500'.  It has not changed since.  Again,
>    I am new, but it is VERY surprising to me that one could expect to
>    upload a package without owning the ITP.  It is especially irritating
>    for this to be dubbed a hijack, as to me it feels the opposite.

I would prefer to just work on packaging but might as well reply to this.

In our initial conversation  I mentioned that I was working on it, was
about to push it to git and asked you to join if you wanted to help.
It should have been clear that it was being worked on but
misunderstanding happen so fine.

For the rest I will just point you to the Developers Rerence:
https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/pkgs.html#adopting

In particular:
"It is not OK to simply take over a package that you feel is neglected
— that would be package hijacking. You can, of course, contact the
current maintainer and ask them if you may take over the package."

and

"Generally, you may not take over the package without the assent of
the current maintainer. Even if they ignore you, that is still not
grounds to take over a package. Complaints about maintainers should be
brought up on the developers' mailing list. If the discussion doesn't
end with a positive conclusion, and the issue is of a technical
nature, consider bringing it to the attention of the technical
committee (see the technical committee web page for more
information)."

The package is still in Debian, is not orphaned, still list Debian
Multimedia as the maintainer and the git repository shows activity
therefore most of that section applies. Also as discussed in bug
#763148 it was known since at least 28 Sep 2014 that most likely only
one of libav/ffmpeg would stay in Debian. Libav was the official
library until just 2 weeks ago therefore the prudent approach was to
wait until all that got sorted out and wait until a FFmpeg transition
(if it ever happened) to reintroduce the package.

> All that being said: yes, I'm still interested in seeing this through.

I've accepted your request: welcome aboard!
Please go through [1] and [2], and if you have questions please do not
hesitate to ask.

[1] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/Join
[2] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/DevelopPackaging

Cheers,
Miguel