[gst-devel] Indifference is not an argument!

[Dennis Heuer]

Dear Thomas Vander Stichele 

First I didn't want to answer. But your indifference in looking at things makes me angry. You are a developer of a product that is offered to others and should be interested in what they think instead of joking at them with sentences like :

"Let's reverse the question: what philosophical problem do you have with 
installing a library ?"

It is not only a stupid question, since there never was any philosophical intend in my statement, but it is either not an appropriate position to your users. I can't force you to overthink things if you don't like to and will not try to but it actually makes sense that I contact the developers who chain me to non-understood dependencies and talk to them before I just go searching for the next tool with other non-understood dependencies. As somebody being dependent on others when it comes to multimedia tools I can only argue, resign or leave. Maybe you should re-think about what your position as the developer implies. It would be better for 0.01% of your users, at least.

To answer the other two core points in your statement:

Core libraries are those libraries you can't get rid of since they are too important for your system. With system I mean a system of interdependent software and not single software or my very own system concept. If I want to install Linux I may be able to drop some tools or libs like termcap. I could use ncurses instead. But I will not be able to skip glibc. So it is with GNOME and esound or with multimedia stuff (video, audio, gaming and such) and SDL. Try staying away from SDL, this isn't easy nowadays, really! But there is no problem in skipping Hermes on a modern GNOME/linux system, except you want to have video support in the single product gst-player. I understand that Hermes is needed, I already wrote this, but talking about this decision should be legitim.

It is also legitim to install from source. The 0.01% have the same rights like others. And, it was not of matter. I just said that I decide on my own what I install and do not leave this decision to distributors. I have very good reasons since I used distros of nearly all well known distributors and always came into trouble or just disliked the bloating of my harddisk, the crazy configuration dialogs and the like. I use linux commercially and need to be able to find better ways for my case. So, I have good reasons (only to answer your comment). This is not related to gst-player, wasn't intendet to be understood this way and, from my point of view, was never expressed this way. It was only an answer to:

"As distributions start to include GStreamer they will also ship most of
these needed 3rd party libraries which will relieve you of the trouble
of having to install them togheter with GStreamer."

becuase this missed the point (as your statement did). I do not want to be relieved from installing by hand, I just wanted to discuss about a main dependency (playing video is one of the _core_ functions of gst-player, isn't it?) that I only need for exact one product of thousands. You can decide if this is of interest to you but, again, it is legitim to discuss about Hermes being a main dependency, atleast if you are interested in your users.

I really don't want philosophical, political or personal discussions. Please, leave me with your indifferent position. I just made use of my right as a user to explain a situation that is worth thinking about if the programmer was interested in thinking about that.

Bye

Dennis

P.s.: If business service people would argue your way their companies would go bankrupt.