[vlc-devel] [vlc-commits] Remove allocine french-only extension

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Le mardi 7 février 2012 18:55:10 Felix Paul Kühne, vous avez écrit :
> On 07.02.2012, at 16:51, Sidney Doria wrote:
> > In terms of usability, yes, the issue is exactly this.
> > However in terms of efficiency, the issue is: why every VLC in all
> > countries should load an extension only useful in a few countries?
> 
> Just for the sake of smart-assing a bit:
> 
> The extension is loaded only in case that a user explicitly opens it
> through the respective menu. In case, s/he refrains from doing so, it just
> wastes 16 kilobytes on the user's storage media.

We don't care about 16 kb of disk space. Consider the size of PO files.

We do care about having an untranslated/-able string in the menus, and many 
more such strings when you click on the thing.

> As mentioned by j-b earlier: even if the user doesn't want to or is unable
> to use it for localization reasons, an included extension raises aware of
> about the fact that VLC can actually use extensions.

That is a very weak argument. Firstly, I have not seen any big announcement 
about more extensions coming even though the support has been there for a 
while. Secondly, the extension backend is buggy and I have not seen much 
effort to fix it. Thirdly, most of the interesting stuff cannot be done with 
extensions; they are little more than a Turing tarpit and a bad user interface 
inside a sandbox (playlist parsers and SDs are far better integrated).

In fact, I would argue that we should exactly NOT be advertising extensions 
because the backend is not sufficiently polished. Fewer extensions mean fewer 
problems when/if the backend is fixed and improved.
(Refer to the refusal of publishing beta versions of VLC for Android.)

Lastly but not least, advertisement ought to be understood by its target. As a 
matter of fact, only a small fraction of VLC users understand French.

-- 
Rémi Denis-Courmont
http://www.remlab.net/
http://fi.linkedin.com/in/remidenis