2007-03-24 20:26MPlayer responseMy views on and dealings with MPlayer are becoming quite a saga, or at least a blog category. I now have something to report after emailing the webmaster@ address I found on their website, but (as perhaps I should have guessed given my previous criticism of the project) communicating with them turned out to be rather difficult. To start with, I never got an email in reply, and had to go into the their IRC channel to get a response, which may innocently be explained by a lack of clearly defined roles in the project. Also, I am prepared to admit that I am not without my own failings, for instance accepting, as this post will explain, that PHP was the wrong language to choose to write the Atomise script in. If I had checked a little harder into the project, like their SVN repository, I may have found the Makefile-based system they use to generate the website (as opposed to a system using files written in a web scripting language). I don’t think that this oversight on my part, however, is as unacceptable as the fact that the first reply I got in the #mplayer channel was a death threat. The exchange went something like this (with names changed to protect the guilty, and parallel conversations removed): <Hagfish> who gets the emails addressed to webmaster@? <Foo> Hagfish: dont dare to send any mail to webmaster that is not related to the webserver or i’ll kill you personaly Understandably this person was worried that I might send irrelevant emails to that address, but that their natural response was to include a (admittedly contingent) death threat suggests that there are some very anti-social people in the MPlayer project. Not everyone was as counter-productive, and soon the following exchange occurred: <Hagfish> i was merely asking who to talk to about the patch i contributed to help with the website <Foo> mplayer website? <Foo> that would go to mplayer-docs <Hagfish> you think i should send a second email? <Hagfish> it’s been two weeks now <Bar> Hagfish: send a reminder as reply, things get easily overlooked or just forgotten <Hagfish> fair enough <Hagfish> thank you Unfortunately, this presented another chance for Foo to show their arrogance and contempt towards users and contributors: <Foo> Hagfish: you got the wrong email adress <Hagfish> which one? <Foo> webmaster <Hagfish> was what i sent not related to the website? <Foo> website != webserver <Foo> webserver -> webmaster <Foo> website -> mplayer-docs <Hagfish> really? <Foo> and nobody adviced you to send a reminder <Foo> yes, really <Hagfish> nobody advised me? <Hagfish> have you read the backscroll just now? <Foo> i didnt at least <Hagfish> i didn’t say that you did <Foo> oh.. Bar did * Foo blames Bar <Hagfish> so what would be a webserver thing to send to the webmaster? <Hagfish> site maintainer: <Hagfish> webmaster <Foo> if the webserver is for some reason not functional <Hagfish> the link on the website only says "site maintainer", i thought that would cover additions to the website <Foo> hmm.. <Hagfish> it should say "server maintainer" or something * Foo has to talk to Baz about the contact page To be fair, once it was cleared up that I was a genuine potential contributor, Foo explained quite politely that they didn’t use PHP because of the traffic to their site and the load that would put on their servers. Apparently they receive 5 hits per minute on the main server, and utilise more than 1 TB of bandwidth in a month. It was here that I had the system they use explained to me, and I had the idea to rewrite the PHP in BASH: <Hagfish> Foo: so when an item of news is added, people are manually editing the HTML source? <Foo> yes and no <Foo> it’s a html + shell script based cms <Hagfish> oh <Hagfish> could i try hacking the shell script to do the job of my php script then? <Foo> sure <Hagfish> thanks <Foo> check the homepage repo <Foo> it contains the whole homepage <Foo> for instructions on how to use it, see mplayer/DOCS/tech/mirrors/ <Hagfish> Foo: is the shell script under: http://svn.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/trunk/ <Foo> dunno.. i think so * Foo does not care about the homepage as long as it works So, with that advice and encouragement, I polished up my BASH skills (with no small help from the Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide) and set about that rewrite. I even thought I’d forestall any future criticism by using pure BASH, not calling any external programs like grep, sed or awk, and certainly not introducing a dependency on an XML transformation engine. Where is the source code? What did they think of it? You’ll have to read the next post. Trackbacks
Trackback specific URI for this entry
No Trackbacks
|
QuicksearchCategoriesSyndicate This BlogBlog Administration |
