[MPlayer-users] Uoti nonsense, and my parting words

Phil Rhodes phil_rhodes at rocketmail.com
Sat May 22 21:23:32 CEST 2010


> Please don't misunderstand me: I of course know that there were tarballs 
> in the
> past that did not compile/did not work correctly, but nearly every day it 
> works
> equally or better than the version from the day before!

It works if you have a build environment that works for it.

> If you believe we can make the configure-script more user-friendly, please 
> say
> so!

I believe you can make the configure-script more user-friendly (what's a 
configure script?)

More accurately: my experience of installing the latest version of software 
is to go to the software's website and download an executable or MSI 
package, which I run, and the software is installed.

To build the source of any non-trivial FOSS package is invariably a 
nightmare of configuration file editing, downloading source and headers, 
copying things into the right directory, poking a few more text files, 
fiddling around. And yes I know all the excuses that exist for this: it's my 
package manager's fault, it's my distro's fault, some aspect or other of my 
system "sucks" but the fact remains that this is very, very difficult to do 
for those of us who aren't both software engineers and Linux systems 
administrators of significant experience.

I don't think I'm particularly stupid, and I await with alacrity all the 
reasons you will probably come up with to show that I am, but at some point 
these issues have to be addressed.

P 



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