2012-05-12, 00:21
My normal reaction to Open Source developers that snidely respond to user case issues with "Submit a Patch" is to refuse to do so. Not everyone has time to contribute to every open source project they use and that doesn't quite fit their needs. I would have been more than happy if you said "We'll look into caching strategies for internet content, but probably not by the next version", but instead it becomes an issue of "We only treat people who submit patches with respect".
This is a structural design issue, not something to leave to a single patch that "scratches an itch". Working out the right ways to cache content from all the different media sources XBMC might see shouldn't be pushed off onto the guy who brought up the issue. Even if I had the time to work on what is actually a pretty big problem, I'd need to fit it in with the rest of the system and things other people are working on. And no one seems at all interested in it so that might be a problem. The contradictory statements on first saying that XBMC does what I wanted, then saying that actually it does something different, and that someone is working on disk caching, or they aren't...
The last time I tried to help XBMC with patches to submit, I ended up duplicating work after explicitly asking if anyone else was working on it and getting a 'no', then finding the person who said 'no' had changed their mind without telling anyone and started some alternative and incompatible work on it, so I wasted my time. I note the issue I was trying to help with, getting the build scripts working on OS X 10.7, still appears to have issues. So I wouldn't be able to do development on XBMC because guess what my build environment is... And no, I'm not interested in setting up a new build environment for XBMC.
This is a structural design issue, not something to leave to a single patch that "scratches an itch". Working out the right ways to cache content from all the different media sources XBMC might see shouldn't be pushed off onto the guy who brought up the issue. Even if I had the time to work on what is actually a pretty big problem, I'd need to fit it in with the rest of the system and things other people are working on. And no one seems at all interested in it so that might be a problem. The contradictory statements on first saying that XBMC does what I wanted, then saying that actually it does something different, and that someone is working on disk caching, or they aren't...
The last time I tried to help XBMC with patches to submit, I ended up duplicating work after explicitly asking if anyone else was working on it and getting a 'no', then finding the person who said 'no' had changed their mind without telling anyone and started some alternative and incompatible work on it, so I wasted my time. I note the issue I was trying to help with, getting the build scripts working on OS X 10.7, still appears to have issues. So I wouldn't be able to do development on XBMC because guess what my build environment is... And no, I'm not interested in setting up a new build environment for XBMC.