Re: [tlug] There are way too many Linux distros

[Attila Kinali <attila@example.com>]

On Sun, 22 Jun 2008 05:37:31 +0900
"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com> wrote:

>  > > "Reinventing the wheel certainly is annoying, but as long
>  > > as all other wheels are square..."
>  > 
>  > Great one :)
> 
> Sad.  Please do *not* propagate this meme

It might be sad, but considering what shit i've seen
over the past years it's necessary. Especially in the
video coding scene there are too many people claiming
to know what they are doing while not having a clue
at all. That's why MPlayer and FFmpeg have rewritten
so much already existing code because it just sucked.

As an example. The original MKV demuxer in MPlayer,
which used the libraries (libmatroska and libebml)
provided by the MKV project itself was 4000 loc 
(plus something around 15k loc for the libraries).
It had serious problems with seeking and broken files.
The rewritten demuxer doesnt use the libraries
anymore but does everything itself within MPlayer,
is just 3000 loc, can cope with broken files
far better and can seek quite well...
And i'm not talking about the design issues in the 
API of the libraries yet and i'm definitly not touching
the design issues within MKV.

Even sadder is, that Reimar is one of the guys within
MPlayer/FFmpeg who promotes reusing existing code a lot...

			Attila Kinali 
-- 
The true CS students do not need to know how to program.
They learn how to abstract the process of programming to
the point of making programmers obsolete.
		-- Jabber in #holo