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

[Attila Kinali]

On Tue, 26 Sep 2006 13:55:16 -0400
Rich Felker <dalias at aerifal.cx> wrote:

> > 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.

Although i wouldn't use the same harsh words as Rich does,
i agree with him. As someone who has done his fair share of
user support for MPlayer i can tell you that you do not want
John Dumb users giving you feedback. They just cost too much
time with very little outcome. They can explain you hours and
hours that this or that feature is absolutely needed and thus
all developers have to imediatly stop all their work and implement
it. And this, although the same (or nearly the same) can be
already achieved by a combination of a few parameters or by
using MPlayer together with another tool.

Also their bug descriptions are most time unusable, if they
are bugs at all and not PEBCAK. In the early times of MPlayer
i spend hours every day to review bugreports from more advanced
users (who more or less knew what they were doing), to make
the bugreport fit for the developers so they would not need
to spend their time on senseless tasks.

Over all, at that time, far less than 10% of the "bugreports" were
real bugs and of those less than 1% were bugreports that were directly
usable without any additional work.

Also, please do not fall to the missconception that we
want that everyone uses MPlayer as their one and only player.
Yes, we take a pride in being one of the most used players
around. Yes, we would like to have more users. But we don't
want to trade the fun of developing for world domination.
Thus, if someone wants to help us making MPlayer better,
faster, more userfriendly etc pp, be our guest. But if
you just demand and don't provide any help[1], then you are
at the wrong place.

			Attila Kinali

[1] "help" can be here just having read the manual and having
found something that is not clear. Or a description of how
to make MPlayer do something it's not to do (also known
as bugreport).