[Gnash-dev] Re: [Gnash] 0.8.2 status & OLPC

[John Gilmore]

It would be good to see if we can close any OLPC bugs or requests before
finalizing 0.8.2 as well.  They are dependent on us for Flash support.

I've been working as a support volunteer for them, taking trouble
tickets from naive users.  The majority of the 40 support people have
an attitude like, "Why do we bother shipping gnash anyway?  Any time
somebody has trouble with it, which is all the time, we just have to
suggest they replace it with Adobe's."

(Anybody can look at the tickets in dev.laptop.org; search for
"gnash".  For a developer who cares, I can also pull out trouble
tickets from the end user support system at rt.laptop.org, which
requires a support-tech login to access.  The majority are along the
lines of "I went to site X (some kid site) and it doesn't work."  The
standard Gnash maintainer response has always been, "Rip the binary
flash file apart, diagnose it, and fix it yourself", which of course
has resulted in zero progress, which is of course why every tech but
me recommends that end users tear out gnash.)

        John