[MPlayer-users] user for user

Max Hofer max at sbox.tugraz.at
Tue Dec 11 02:28:10 CET 2001


i read now this mailing list since a couple months and a lot of effort 
(dvelopers and users) are put into discussions about RTFM.

the 1st time when i found this maling list i thought it was a user-for-user 
mailing list, i.e. users give their experiences about the use of mplayer. i 
never thought a developer of mplayer would answer my questions (and as usual 
the answer was RTFM). i did not know anything about audio/video streams, nor 
about the diffrent video formats. i simple lacked the knowledge of the media 
language. i just wanted to play one single file which i was not able to play. 
and i thought maybe another user made the same experience. the answer was a 
harsh RTFM (which i did btw but i had no clue for which word i should "grep" 
for) and reading tousands of lines only because i lack of terms is just silly.

i'm a coder myself, and one of the 1st things i learned is that a user NEVER 
has the same point of view as a coder has. so IMHO you developers here are 
quite unqualified to answer user-question regarding "normal" questions. 
during their coding work they loose the objective point of view of an user. 
no one is able to forget what you learned.

so what i propose is splitting up the maling list (i do not know if there 
exists already a developer-maling list) in two lists: a user-list and a 
developer list.

and developers are not meant to answer questions on the user list with RTFM. 
just ignore the user maling list and concentrate on the maling list you 
should work on, the developer mailing list.

this are my 2 cents on the usual RTFM

and yeah, mplayer is a great piece of work. but some developers here really 
need to mature a bit.

cya Max




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