[MPlayer-users] (no subject)

[Phil Rhodes]

> The mplayer-users list usually requires that you use the latest svn 
> MPlayer.

I hate this attitude.

It is extremely difficult for anyone who isn't a software engineer to "use 
latest SVN". The link to ubuntuforums.org gives a long, highly complex 
sequence of instructions which, and let's not bullshit, almost invariably 
require customisation in the vast majority of circumstances.  Making these 
changes will be beyond anyone who isn't intimately familiar with package 
management, makefiles, GCC, and the C language itself, as well as the 
specifics of all these things as they pertain to mplayer and its 
installation.

My feeling is that the people who develop and support mplayer (along with a 
lot of other opensource programs) know this, and use it as a foil to simply 
avoid giving any support; it's easy to get the impression that the attitude 
here is simply that the developers consider themselves - inaccurately - to 
be an intellectual elite, and it's quite simply beneath them to communicate 
with the user proletariat until said proles have somehow proven themselves, 
effectively by becoming another software engineer. I fully appreciate why 
people don't like supporting outdated software; I've done it myself, but 
this constant demand to do something that you must reasonably know is 
difficult or impossible is entirely unreasonable.

It is rarely if ever as simple as typing "make && make install", much as 
some people like to pretend that it is. Since this list is called 
"mplayer-users" (not "mplayer-developer", or 
"intermediate-software-engineering"), can I suggest that a more flexible 
approach would be appropriate? Jaunty is recent enough that changes since 
then should be well known, and their application to the user's problem 
easily determined.

P