[MPlayer-dev-eng] Re: [Q] How to build a universal binary for, the Mac OS X?

[Rich Felker]

On Tue, Sep 26, 2006 at 10:03:45AM -0700, JongAm Park wrote:
> Wow!
> 
> Did I set fire in this mailing list?
> I am the one who asked this question, but I didn't expect that it would 
> be discussed this hotly.
> 
> By the way, according to some people, this "build" issue is not "dev" issue.
> So, why don't we talk it at... Ah.. Is there any forum available on the 
> mplayer web site?

As far as I'm concerned issues with developing the build system are
development questions. However this quite positively was not a
developer question.

In determining whether a question is a development question, ask
yourself if you're trying to solve a problem you're having or if
you're trying to solve a problem that the developers are having. "How
can I...?" is almost ALWAYS a user question, unless you're asking
about which way would be acceptable to include a new feature into the
source or similar.

> Some people argue that the MacOS X portion in the market is small, and 

This may or may not be true but it's irrelevant. Nasty hacks for
particular OS are not welcome, whether the OS os popular or obscure.

> Celluo and so on. So, "let's take care of big pies only" doesn't sound 
> reasonable. Probably the most actual users of the mplayer may not be 
> Windows users.

This is not the approach. The approach is based on standards and
commonality between systems, and just plain sanity. If a system lacks
these qualities, users are on their own.

> So, they can't feedback to "dev" mailing list. With similar reason, they 
> can't to the "users" mailing list also. "mailing list" is too difficult 
> to them. They only open a web browsers and call it "doing internet"!.  
> Although they complain about the performance or some glitches of the 
> Windows Network neighborhood, or SAMBA, they don't use the good and old FTP.
> They are that kind of people. Do you expect that they can "subscribe" 
> mailing list which only contains text which looks boring, and give feedback?

What you're describing is outright idiots. Babbling morons who are
full of themselves because they can play starcraft and download divx.
It's quite good that the support channels are not friendly to such
people because such people just make a big nuisance for developers.
They need to grow up and learn how to ask intelligent questions
through intelligent channels if they want to be listened to. Otherwise
they can enjoy the bad performance, poor compatibility, and codec-hell
of Quicktime and other commercial crap.

If we were a business trying to sell copies of MPlayer, maybe these
people would matter to us. Since we are not, they don't matter to us.
If they insist on remaining idiots, it's their problem, not ours.

Rich