[gentoo-dev] Last rites for media-video/helixplayer

["Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò" <flameeyes@gentoo.org>]

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After realplayer the last week, also helixplayer is pending removal from the 
tree.

HelixPlayer, opensource player developed by Real and somewhat similar to 
RealPlayer has a bad history of security vulnerabilities and it's still 
vulnerable to a security issue (1.0.6 is out but still missing an ebuild).
As the maintainership of this package is difficult, and the package by itself 
is a bit of a mess (for example it does only build fine on x86, no way it can 
work on amd64 or other platforms AFAICS), I've masked it and it's pending 
removal in 24h.

As the release of 2.0 version is imminent [1], and that version *might* work 
better on non-x86 arches, the media-video herd reserve the possibility of a 
return when that version is released (hopefully with less security concerns).

If someone wants to join the herd for maintaining this package, is absolutely 
welcome. Knowing the past problems, if someone wants, it's also invited to 
write a maintainer's guide (similar to xine's[2]) so that if it's going to 
leave the team someone else will know how to treat it.

[1] https://player.helixcommunity.org/2005/dev/plans.html
[2] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/desktop/video/xine.xml
-- 
Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò - http://dev.gentoo.org/~flameeyes/
Gentoo/ALT lead, Gentoo/FreeBSD, Video, AMD64, Sound, PAM, KDE

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