[MPlayer-users] Documentation and dumb questions

[SMuelas]

You are a nice man, Gabor. You must feel sometimes a little bit shocked
with your not-so-nice colleagues   :-)

To establish a good documentation is always something hard to do and,
what is worse, boring. Nevertheless, your great success with MPLAYER
obliges you in some way to improve what you have done (in documentation)
as so many people contact you. You must realize that something is wrong
when so many people ask the same "stupid" questions. I think that I
understand your points, because I hear everyday a similar melody. I am a
professor at the University and most of my colleagues complain all the
time about the students, but students are all right if you take a
minimal effort to make their live easier. Sometimes it is boring,
sometimes hard, but the result is always worthwhile.
And if you want some ideas, the first one that come to my mind is a
good, complete INDEX to let people find what they search with a minimal
effort and quickly. And include this index with the distribution to be
able to go to the needed links (the last PNG distribution, the right gcc
compiler, the simple and clear explanation about the way of improving
the quality obtained -use of dga with sdl...- and so on).
But this is just an idea and perhaps you have more important things to
improve .... :-)

Best regards to all the team 


On Fri, 2001-11-30 at 20:53, Gábor Lénárt wrote:
> [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html &
>  http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-2.96.html if you still have questions or problems]
> 
> On Fri, Nov 30, 2001 at 11:45:35AM -0600, David Harris wrote:
> > Again I do apologize.  I just hate to see people get upset over things
> > like this.  I think Mplayer is great.  and with a little bit of work and
> > understanding it can be installed, and used in a few minutes.   but I know
> > the frustration of being treated like someone who is inferrior because I
> > dont have all the same knowledge that others have.  I got that from a lot
> > of people 5 years ago when i started using linux.   I know enough about
> > mplayer now to get it functioning.  even on my little 166.   
> 
> Nice to hear. And feel free to send ideas how documentation would be
> extended. You know we're seeing the topic from the point of view of developers
> so we may miss some points a novice mplayer user needs. So we need such a
> feedbacks about the dox, too. But please don't send only "dox need to be
> extended" messages but some IDEAS too WHAT we sould explain inside mplayer
> documentation. As you can imagine almost all of the open source projects
> came from the need of developers so the structure of program mainly reflects
> the needs of developers of course. So feedbacks should be welcome we to
> be able to see the project from another point of view as well ...
> 
> - Gabor
> _______________________________________________
> RTFM!!!  http://www.MPlayerHQ.hu/DOCS
> Search:  http://www.MPlayerHQ.hu/cgi-bin/htsearch
> http://mplayerhq.hu/mailman/listinfo/mplayer-users
> 
-- 
Santiago Muelas (Depto. de Mecánica)         
http://w3.mecanica.upm.es/~smuelas
ETSI de Caminos, Canales y Puertos (U.P.M)    smuelas at mecanica.upm.es
Dr.Aranguren s/n - Ciudad Universitaria       Tf. 91 336 6659
MADRID 28040