[MPlayer-users] Can't get crop to work

[alex at foogod.com]

On Sun, Aug 11, 2002 at 10:29:41PM +0200, Arpi wrote:
> agree. so feel free to fix it and send patch, or at least send a proper
> bugreport...

Frankly, I'm currently involved in several other open source projects, and
mplayer is only a tangential interest for me at the moment, so I really just
don't have time to fix your bugs for you.

Considering that it was apparently immediately obvious to you and other
developer-types here exactly why that segfault was occurring, I would also
suggest that the initial report WAS a "proper bugreport" as after reading it
you had enough information to locate and fix the problem.

What I'm personally objecting to, really, is the quite antagonistic attitude
I've seen here on this list (which is ostensibly a "users list") from several
of the developers towards users with perfectly valid questions, and the
reluctance to admit that anything (including segfaults) might actually be a
code bug, instead implying that they're the user's fault.

> flaming the developers of an opensource nonprofit project may be funny, but
> isn't useful at all.

I wasn't flaming, actually, I was explaining to the user that what they seemed
to be assuming was their fault, in fact, wasn't.  It's an important
distinction, because I personally believe developers should be willing to be
responsible for their code and not make users feel like bad people because they
discovered a bug (this is one of the things that separates us open-source
developers from the likes of Microsoft).

Before this degenerates into a flame war, I would like to say that I did not
mean to imply that Mplayer is bug-riddled, or even has very many bugs.  From
what I've seen it looks like it is generally a fairly well-written peice of
software.  I can understand that my initial statement might have been
misconstrued as a bit harsher than it was intended, so I apologize if that
happened.

I do not consider the term "buggy software" to be a flame.  All software has
bugs.  The true measure of good software is in how severe the bugs are and how
those bugs are dealt with when they're discovered.

-alex