[MPlayer-users] rant

[Andrew Suffield]

On Mon, Oct 08, 2001 at 10:38:51PM +0200, Gábor Lénárt wrote:
> It does not worth to support! If you can select between functions optimized
> for various CPUs it would take much more memory and a bit more CPU time
> (function pointers). If you make dynamic loadable "plugins" it would
> decrease performance about between 10 and 20 percent (afaik). The latter
> because on x86 relocation information should be kept in a register (and
> shared objects are this kind of thing ..). 

Uhh, this is complete nonsense. If written in any reasonable manner it 
will be no slower. Also, mplayer already links against half a dozen 
shared libraries, and dynamically loads dvd support at run time as 
necessary. You don't even need to use any shared code, that's just the
neatest solution.

> Our world is not perfect. Usually modularity is against the performance ...

Usually it makes no impact on runtime performance, only on load time. 
That's why unix-like systems have been modularly designed for the last 
20 years or so.

> And please note that there're more reasons for this remark in the possible
> future full GPL licence: user compiled mplayer versions can be even buggy,
> because of buggy compilers, not perfectly used options at configuring ...
> Inmagine that a novice mplayer user get a binary of mplayer with only some
> component compiled in. So that user would say: it's a piece of shit, it can't
> do anything.

a) a complete moron will always get the wrong end of the stick somehow
b) why do you care, anyway? is the approval of halfwits so important to you?

> Of course it can be happen nowdays too, but at least we can
> point to dox that this is banned so you have been warned ... But IMHO it's
> a general problem about free softwares. While I stronly believe in free
> software (and GPL as well), as developers we don't want to get tons of
> bugreport which is useless for us because it's "user error".

Then quit getting users. Sloppily compiled binaries are rare unless you use 
redhat; user error is extremely common. There are plenty of other 
opportunities for a user to screw up. Live with the users or unsubscribe 
from the list.

It's nothing to do with free software, either. Stupid people are 
universal.

-- 
  .''`.  ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield
 : :' :                         | Dept. of Computing,
 `. `'                          | Imperial College,
   `-    http://www.debian.org/ | London, UK