The Open-Source software approach: let them eat pixels ?
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Note: this is not meant to be a "rant" ... more of a "case study" ... and I'm interested in how you react to this. I deeply appreciate the countless hours of effort that creators of open-source software (and, of course, the incredible variety of useful content that sites like CP host/nurture) ! Case in point, I posted an issue on the HandBrake (written with .NET) GitHub site about how the app is unusable on a 1360x768 screen (with some font "enlargement" enabled because of my vision problems). I noticed other similar issues reported there. The issue was promptly closed with this reply by (I assume a principal) dev [quotes from my issue post in italics]:
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As a .NET programmer, I wonder how it's possible_ to create a Window that behaves like this. It's not quite as trivial as you might expect, especially when you have multiple dynamically sized regions that need to both up and downscale correctly. It's not hard, it's just tedious to get it working correctly in all situations. 1366x768 should actually be fine, but only if you run at 100% or 96dpi which I'm guessing your not. At the end of the day, we have so few people using HandBrake on low-end hardware that it doesn't warrent me diverting any time to tweak the UI to downscale better. I already have a huge list of stuff to do that would come in front. I suggest you put a clear message on the download page on the HB site suggesting you do not use HandBrake if, in fact, there is a requirement to have a screen res > 1366,768 Then we'd have to mention 100 other things, at which point it's no longer clear. The new documentation when it comes online in the near future will have a recommended system requirements page that details all the in's and outs but I doubt most people will bother reading it. If I or anyone else ever gets around to replacing our installer with something more flexible, some of this can be checked before the app installs.
Too bad that such an excellent app (implements HEVC H.265 encoding) is encumbered with such a problem. Of course, one can take the attitude that free software, and the generous people who implement it, should never be criticized. In my experience, the "attitude" shown in this reply to an issue is not typical of open-source software ! I wonder if it would be in "bad taste" to post a response to the person who replied to me at HandBrake with a link to an answer to a QA question I wrote today on this very topic: [
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Stephen McCafferty wrote:
If you - someone who needs the fix - don't care enough to at least try and fix it, why should someone else
I'm stunned that you can say such things without fainting from embarrassment. "If you don't like the way the trains don't run on time, then why don't you fix it?" The question that should be asked is: "If you can't handle this project, then why the *u** are you distracting us from the efforts of people who can?" "_Oh, it's fre_e", is no excuse for bad work or bad customer relations, because the people who work on such projects really don't do it for the fabled "nothing". If they don't profit financially, they gain some other way.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
That's not what I said at all.