[FFmpeg-devel] Democratic election of the server admins

[Michael Niedermayer]

On Sun, Jul 04, 2010 at 01:16:42AM +0200, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 03, 2010 at 03:58:13PM -0700, Jason Garrett-Glaser wrote:
> > On Sat, Jul 3, 2010 at 3:54 PM, Jason Garrett-Glaser
> > <darkshikari at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On Sat, Jul 3, 2010 at 3:48 PM, Michael Niedermayer <michaelni at gmx.at> wrote:
> > >> Hello thouse who rule, thouse who are all the developers of ffmpeg.
> > >>
> > >> I belive that ffmpeg as fundamentally democratic project
> > >
> > > It's rather hard to be a "fundamentally democratic project" with you
> > > as the BDFL.
> > >
> > > Not that there's anything wrong with that. ?Democracy is overrated.
> > >
> > > Dark Shikari
> > >
> > 
> > To elaborate: mixing politics and coding is a terrible, terrible,
> > terrible idea.  Creating "elections" in a project that is primarily
> > about coding is going to do nothing but create unnecessary divisions,
> > hassle, and animosity.  If you want to pick admins, find a better way
> > to do it.
> 
> iam not sure, if i agree with you, after all ffmpeg is not me but all
> the people on this list who contribute. I simply dont feel that i have
> the authority to replace one of the server admins. Also i do not want
> to do such a decission without the other developers agreeing.
> Basically i dont want to be a evil dictator ...
> And i dont want to point at anyone and say nasty things any more than i
> have to. And arguing "why" would require such finger pointing.
> And ive said enough nasty things in the cvslog discussions already

and to add to this, i also dont want to have to deal with the existing
admin team for the rest of all eternity. At a minimum i need to have
the ability to close peoples accounts including the admins!
if they violate policy repeatly and refuse to correct it. Its very very
unlikely that i ever would have to close anyones account
even threatening is very likely not needed, just the ability to do it is,
otherwise some people just do whatever they like.
And if this wouldnt be actually happening it also wouldnt be needed, its
the actual fact on cvslog that makes this something needed.

What i ask for is just the basic power anyone creating a project on
soureforge has
Also in all of ffmpegs existence i only once requested an account to
be closed (uotis) and while this was an obvious clear case it was a
nightmare to get it through the admin team.
would i ask them to close their own accounts, well, forget it. They
know they wouldnt and so they can commit whatever they like.
This vote would end this, the alternative would be to move away from
mphq. But thats bad, if for example not all developers move we could
end with a splited project.

And just to make sure theres no misunderstanding i dont care at all about
1st vs. 3rd person the 1st person can stay if people like it more
i care about how this change was done. Had it been discussed first it
would have been a totally different thing.
That said i do intend to eventually start a vote on
1st vs 3rs vs its maintainers decission
thats just really not important now


[...]
-- 
Michael     GnuPG fingerprint: 9FF2128B147EF6730BADF133611EC787040B0FAB

If a bugfix only changes things apparently unrelated to the bug with no
further explanation, that is a good sign that the bugfix is wrong.
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