[MPlayer-users] nvidia and suse bug

[Attila Kinali]

On Fri, 18 Oct 2002 23:59:36 +1000 (EST)
John Knight <anarchisttomato at yahoo.com.au> wrote:


> There's a constant RTFM attitude everywhere associated
> with Mplayer, and as this is being so harshly
> enforced, I figured maybe what you jsut said could be
> put in the documentation (don't write to us.... etc.)?

Maybe it's time again to discuss this again.
Yes, there is a lot of RTFM around mplayer, some may think
we are too harsh. Yes, we are harsh, but we have a reason
for it: If you read the -users mailinglist carefully there
is about 80% just of questions that could be simply answered
by reading the documentation (on the irc channel it's
about 98%). Yes, I know that it takes quite some time to read
it but you should.
You should also keep in mind that mplayer was originaly written
by Arpi for himself, later other people joined, but most of them
wrote the stuff for themselfs. That does not mean that we dont
want that anyone else beside the developers use it, but that
the users should know that mplayers first priority is not to
be easy to use but to do the job. Even though using mplayer
got easier over time it still needs some knowledge about
video formats, video codecs, graphic cards, sound cards
and a bit of the inner working of mplayer. But all what
a normal user should know is written in the documentation
(Gabu, Diego and Jonas did a very good job).
Answering all those questions that are written in documentation
and which could be found just by quickly checking the manpage
or reading the FAQ take a lot of time to answer (for me
it takes every day between 30 minutes up to 3 hours just
to do mplayer-users) and we'd like to use that time for other
things (like coding, finding bugs, writing documentation).

I hope this made it a bit clearer for you.
Thank you for your understanding.

			Attila Kinali

PS: i encurage everyone here, who does not like the way i answer
or what i wrote to answer the question himself. I'm neither a
know-it-all nor always right and sometimes in a bad mood.
(beside it would save me some time :)


-- 
It must have been some unmarried fool that said "A child can ask questions
that a wise man cannot answer"; because, in any decent house, a brat that
starts asking questions is promptly packed off to bed.
                -- Arthur Binstead