Mplayer Revisited

Joe Barr writes "It's been two years since I first wrote about Mplayer. Maybe the fury of the developers/community reaction to the fact that I dared to criticize them for their treatment of users kept me away. Whatever. Now Mplayer has a pre1 version of release 1.0 out there and it's time for another look." Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN.

Comments

Don't flame the devs

[arvindn]

Doesn't the author understand how the Linux/OSS community works, or what? Its not the devs' job to make shiny installation druids that you can click through. That's what distros are for. If you want to compile software, be prepared to do your homework. If not wait for the .deb to become available or subscribe to RedHat network etc.

Gimme a break.

Re:Don't flame the devs

[pgrdsl]

Once upon a time, many years ago, free software was wild and untamed. When you downloaded a tar-file, it may, or may not, unpack in ".". Sometimes it was a shar(k) and you had to hope it didn't eat any of your files when you ran it.

And then, once you had your nice shiny sources, you could compile it. After, of course, hand editing the Makefile. Oh, and the other one. And, damn, that silly config file. And then you would fix all the compilation problems because it had been developed on a different version of Unix, and used strdup.

But, in those days, men were real men, and hackers were real hackers.

People complained, whinged, sent patches, and things improved.

And then, miracle of miracle, automated configure and build scripts came. There was the perl one, which asked lots of questions that nobody ever knew the answers to. Then there was the GNU configure scripts, which tried out things and found what worked.

And, yea!, verily, time was saved all round the world. Things started to work. Porting to other platforms became simpler. Installation was tamed, and things went were you expected them to.

What I'm trying to get at is: the same argument about "be prepared to do your homework" was used years ago pre-autoconf. Nobody would even think of going back to hand-editing all those Makefiles.

It doesn't take a vast amount of effort to get a sane build and installation process, and the amount of time it saves everyone (including the developers themselves) is massive.

With distros it is less of an issue for mere mortals, but the benefit any open source project will get from being easy to configure and install is that developers who are willing to chase bugs will do so - because it takes no pain to build.

Re:Of course you were criticised!

[curne]

Much amused.

But I cannot say I agree. I find it refreshing that a development team develops a high end program that requires some seriousness of people to use. It is becoming a widespread myth that free software developers are little Tele-tubbie-happy people just sitting on their asses coding for hundreds of idiots that luckilly flock to their mailing lists.

MPlayer is a fantastic program (along with other fantastic media programs running on Linux & Co) so many users want it to work for them. And I think that the MPlayer core team acknowledge that but when you for time number 796 get an email reading 'I problem compiling, Please help!!! Is it bug?' with no log or dump... well the coding gets sour. So I can understand that criticism is difficult to take. Especially when it seems as unfounded as the first review.