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

[Reimar Döffinger]

Hi,

>> 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.

Well, I could say that afterwards you'd be a user who has learned 
something... That's not too bad is it ;-)

>> 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.

I made different experiences. At least those kind of people I know 
always asked me at once what these messages are supposed to mean...

> 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.

But anyone who does things in the right order for a bugreport, like 
first searching if it was already reported, will stumble over the answer 
very fast...
And maybe humor isn't a good enough reason, but maybe having our own 
style. If that style doesn't fit the majority of developers, ok, but I 
won't vote for removing it before that...
And last but not least, -dumpstream isn't exactly an option for a 
first-time user I think. Maybe some kind of a bit cryptic addition to 
the manpage would help? Like adding to the -dumpstream description: 
"P.S.: Sometimes you shouldn't take MPlayer's output too seriously ;-)"

Greetings,
Reimar Döffinger