[MPlayer-users] Why not make an installer?

[Attila Kinali]

On Sun, 21 Dec 2003 21:38:18 +0200
Martin <lagitus at mbnet.fi> wrote:

> [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
> MPlayer is certainly an impressive piece of software but the difficulties of 
> installing it along with all the different codecs, fonts, GUIs etc. are IMO 
> keeping potential users away from it and hinder moving to Linux entirely. 
> Since making a RPM-type installable binary package for all distros is not 
> possible, why not make an installer? 

Yes, it's quite hard to read, understand and follow a README.
I can understand that over 200 lines with over 1300 words are
tedious to read. Especialy in a world where everything is being
laid infront of our feet ready to use.
Sorry, no. MPlayer is not hard to install especialy not the fonts
windows dll and GUI skins, it's just another step to be done,
nothing difficult there. What is difficult is to read the documentation
and understand that MPlayer as software and the MPlayer Development Team
expects you to have at least some minimal clue about what you are doing
and that you at at least read the part of the documentation concerning
the installation. If you are not able to do that you are better
off with using something else as you will have a hard time using
MPlayer anyways.


> An installer like Loki Games' (also used by Unreal Tournament 2003 and some 
> other games) could solve this problem nicely. It could have checkboxes for 
> installing different codecs and display the necessary licenses for each 
> separately. Since better performance is gained when compiling the software 
> oneself, the installer could do that as well. It could have scripts for 
> finding necessary configure paths (like --with-gtk-config) and a field for 
> custom configure flags for more advanced users.

What's hard about ./configure && make && make install ?
Oh right, there is no graphical installer showing you nice pics and
telling you what mplayer can do while compiling.
Heck, why would anyone want to spend his free time to write something
like this when the current solution is already good ?
Yes, we aim for world domination, like everyone else, but we want to
have fun doing it. And i can asure you, it's no fun to write silly
programs so that someone who doesn't have a clue what he's doing
can run compile and run your programm. We even had to write many
DAU protections because they couldn't follow the simple rule about
how to handle code or read the manpage. That wasn't fun at all, but
it needed to be done because those DAUs keept spaming the mailinglists
about missing features or bugs which were nothing then plain old PEBCAK.

Look even at this mailinglist, there is hardly a bugreport that does tell
the minimal information we need to pin down the problem, thus reading
those "bugreports" is just a waste of time. Even though there is a step
by step documentation that tells you what to do.
That's why most of the developers refuse to read this list.

> Using Loki Games' installer would give a half-finished solution along with an 
> update mechanism.
> 
> I would love to make this myself but I haven't got the skill nor the time.

Then you are out of luck.


				Attila Kinali
-- 
egp ist vergleichbar mit einem ikea bausatz fuer flugzeugtraeger
			-- reeler in +kaosu