RH10 multimedia support

Joseph Phillips jphillips at amphus.com
Sat Sep 6 01:32:27 UTC 2003


> Amen! My point is not against requiring admin privilege to install, but
> against the pop-up in the first place. If there is a legitimate need for
> a plug-in, there should be a separate install (such as rpm) for it. 

But there can never be an official RPM from Red Hat, since these
software products, in many cases, are closed-source, non-free, non-GPL,
etc.  If it were only as easy as Red Hat supplying an RPM, then this
would be a non-issue.

The problem is, how do you engineer a standardized way for a browser to
accept plugins, without actually pre-packaging the plugins in the
distribution?

There could be 5 different plugins that I want to install on my Red Hat
system.  Of each of those 5 different plugins, they all have a different
method of installation.  Some are in RPM format.  Some are binaries
packaged in a tar.gz format that require manual copying of files to
certain directories, some have proprietary installation scripts, etc. 
Not only that, but, for each of these 5 different plugins, there are
multiple browsers that need to be configured.  Red Hat distributes
Epiphany, Konqueror, and Mozilla.  So now you have to multiply those 5
plugins by 3, which leaves 15 different plugin installations.

As a user, it sucks to have to hunt around on the Internet, going to 15
different web sites, trying to find these different plugins, for each
different browser, each with a different method of installation that
requires going into the console, reading installation documentation that
was prepared by 3rd parties, etc.

And if you object to the pop-up installation design, then how about a
"Plugin Manager", that provides a GUI wizard method which automates the
above describes process?

And it's the same point with the movie player (or shall I say, the lack
of a movie player).  When RH10 ships with Totem, I'm sure it won't come
with any codecs that most of us want.  So how do we install the codecs? 
Does Totem have a wizard that walks the user through downloading and
installing the codecs?  Or do we have to go hunt for them on the
Internet, download and read through poorly written 3rd party
documentation, and open up the console and start copying files into
deeply buried system directories?





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