[MPlayer-dev-eng] The future of a GUI

[Reimar Döffinger]

On 12 Mar 2011, at 21:38, Ingo Brückl <ib at wupperonline.de> wrote:
> Concerning stream_vcd I've learned that there is another way to do it. Ok.
> Thanks to Reimar for the patch, I'll test it. But nevertheless a fundamental
> question remains.
> 
> Is it absolutely taboo to make changes that might be counterproductive but
> may help at the moment, although they have to be reverted in future?

No it is not, but making a completely cosmetic change that increases the chances of forgetting about the issue and can be fixed at least better, possibly even correctly within 5 minutes (plus testing I admit) is not.

> To give an example on a counterproductive patch and to return to the topic
> of what I didn't dare to ask so far, r31377 patch for example should be
> reverted. This patch removed the call to a guiMessageBox() from within
> mp_msg(). Clearly, a GUI must be informed about messages issued (and decide
> then itself what to do with them).
> 
> Although this reversion is ugly and unwanted,

The problem is that it's not just ugly but a broken mess.
mp_msg can be called from different threads or even different processes (e.g. cache) and just reverting it just make it cause GUI crashes again.
I don't think it's a particularly good place to start unless you can think of a way that actually works and isn't too much effort to be worth implementing.