cplay package dont install any player, leaving the frontend useless

This package hasn't seen an update in a couple of years. Unfortunately I'm not real familiar with it. Do you have a suggestion for front-ends that are known to work? Thanks for the bug report!

this frontend work excellent when you install any of the suggested players. =)

Aye sorry I meant players. How are we supposed to depend on a player if there are multiple players that work? Who decides which is the "best" player? Thanks.

maybe we can let the user decide asking what of the four players install but we must install one if none of these are present.

Presumably ogg support is wanted and only ogg123 can do that. So I guess moving vorbis-tools to depends from reccomends.

If you look in the cplay source (search for "PLAYERS") you can see it makes a distinction between 3 different types of player FrameOffsetPlayer, TimeOffsetPlayer and NoOffsetPlayer.

NoOffsetPlayer means that you can't rewind or fast-forward using that player.

Offset capable players that support mp3 are splay, mpg123, mpg321 and madplay. When a track is played in cplay it goes through the list in that order to find one that is installed. So if you have all 4 installed it will use splay. So you might say that there is an preference within the program for splay.

If you put "python, vorbis-tools, mpg321 | madplay | splay | mpg123" into depends does it ask the user which one to install if none are installed?

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. You reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering is this still an issue for you? Can you try with latest Ubuntu release? Thanks in advance.

The dependencies for this program have not changed since this bug was created.

This application doesn't seem to be in development anymore. I believe this is supposed to be its homepage - http://www.tf.hut.fi/~flu/hacks/cplay/ which has an error message (I think). The link posted takes you elsewhere, which also seems to have an error message.
As for dependencies, having it ask you for a program that uses it is not how the system works. There are certainly many, many packages out there that are useless without programs that use them, but we can't expect the package managers to ask you each time you install such packages (though you could try to file a bug report to request that if you really thought it was necessary or useful w/out being annoying). If you want to see what available packages depend on a specific package, use
 apt-cache rdepends <package>
If you were to run
 apt-cache rdepends python | grep cplay
you would see that cplay depends on python.

I feel that, because of the above, this bug can be closed with status Won't Fix - please let me know what you think. Thank you.

I don't understand why is important that this soft isn't in develop or maintained anymore, the program runs fine once a player is installed, this isn't a cplay bug.

If showing to the user the option to choose any of the compatible players is annoying just install one player or like gentoo, arch and many others distro do show a little message that inform to the user that he must install a compatible player for make this program usefull.

I really don't see the point to the "There are certainly many, many packages out there that are useless without programs that use them" if in other packages are dependency problems must be corrected there too, good packages and dependency resolv is why ppl choose a Debian based distribution instead a RH one.

In my opinion this bug must be fixed here in Ubuntu or Debian and has nothing to do with this program not being developed anymore.

I remark, if you install any of the compatible players Cplay works like a charm.

/* Sorry for my english */

There seem to be two problems here:

1. the packaging system isn't flexible enough to include a rule requiring 'at least one of a set of packages' to be installed.

2. the program itself doesn't alert the user to the need to install a compatible player, instead it just fails silently when you attempt to play a track.

I'd suggest the best user experience would be achieved by having a post-installation script (or a first-run script) which checks for the availability of audio players, and (if none are installed) prompt the user to install one via the package manager. I'm sure I've seen this done for other packages before.

I agree with QUASAR_FREAK that the fact that this is no longer under development isn't really relevant.

The package should Recommend (rather than Suggest) the disjunction of the supported players. We should find a preferred player and have that as the first disjunct.

> 1. the packaging system isn't flexible enough to include a rule requiring 'at least one of a set of packages' to be installed.

That's not true. We can represent disjunctions fine, as is done in the Suggests line in cplay. The Suggests should be moved to a Recommends or Depends. I'm not quite sure which is better, but perhaps the latter now I think about it.