[MPlayer-dev-eng] mms:// saying "Core dumped ;)"

[The Wanderer]

D Richard Felker III wrote:

> On Mon, Sep 20, 2004 at 12:40:11PM -0400, The Wanderer wrote:
> 
>> D Richard Felker III wrote:

>>> no, i'm strongly in favor of keeping the message. we could just
>>> put a filter rule on the mailing list to bounce mails containing
>>> the string "Core dumped ;)" with a message: "you are stupid!"
>> 
>> ...
>> 
>> For what it's worth: I normally consider myself elitist, but I
>> think this is rather excessive. MPlayer is *not* a program "for use
>> only by the elite" - and since many non-elite people do have a
>> problem with this (and indeed I myself would not have correctly
>> interpreted the message if I hadn't seen it explained), insisting
>> on keeping the misleading message just for its own sake amounts to
>> setting up a barrier to use by anyone not In The Know.
>> 
>> I would support the suggested MSGTR_ name change, at a minimum; I
>> don't mind the message itself in my own use, but I would also
>> support changing it for reasons of clarity and user-friendliness.
>> As things currently stand, this mesage is one of the very few parts
>> of MPlayer which is *intentionally* very decidedly neither.
> 
> what could be friendlier than some humor? :))
> 
> seriously, this is not a matter of "elite" versus "non-elite". it's a
> matter of common sense. having common sense does not make you elite.

No offense, but what seems common-sensical and obvious to the elite is
not necessarily so to the non-elite. (I say this from the perspective of
someone who has noticed it more than once from the "elite" side of such
an equation.)

> when a program prints core dumped, WITH A SMILEY FACE AFTER IT, and
> outputs a perfectly valid file, then anyone with the least bit of
> sense will think "hey, nice joke, these guys have a sense of humor!"

But that's the thing. Upon seeing "Core dumped", with or without the
unobtrusive (and certainly not glaringly obvious) little smiley nearby,
my first reaction is not going to be "test the file and see if it
works"; I'm much more likely to assume "something has gone wrong, the
file is bad and probably doesn't even exist". I am certainly not likely
to actually test the file; if I notice that it actually was created, I'm
likely to delete it promptly so as to free up disk space, since
something which produced such a well-known fatal-error message is
obviously not going to be complete and probably not going to be correct.

> it's not that confusing... mplayer has many much more serious cases
> of "pointless message that looks like an error" to confuse users,
> which should be fixed, but this is not one of them..

You think it isn't, I (and apparently many users less elite than either
of us) think it is. The only other "looks like an error but isn't"
messages I can think of offhand are the "codecs.conf not found" and
"missing font" messages, both of which are less problematic because they
a) appear in a flood of other, more-useful information, and b) are most
often followed immediately by an automatic demonstration that the thing
works anyway.

The point is: this is obvious and funny when you know about it and know
what it means, but is confusing, misleading and obfuscatory when you
don't. Since some/many/most of the people who use the program don't (as
evidenced by the number of 'bug reports' about the message), I think the
humor is not a good enough reason to keep it.

I have no problem with - and even greatly enjoy - pointless humor in
random places in programs. What I object to is when such humor gets in
the way of functionality - and for at the very least a significant
minority of users, this message apparently does exactly that. Like
anything else which obstructs functionality and can be removed at no
practical cost, I would say that it almost certainly should.

-- 
       The Wanderer

Warning: Simply because I argue an issue does not mean I agree with any
side of it.

A government exists to serve its citizens, not to control them.