[FFmpeg-devel] Preliminary announcement about the current situation

[Ronald S. Bultje]

Michael,

first off, allow me to say there probably is not one single reason
that we all subscribe to. Rather, we are collective in our dissent.

On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 10:53 PM, Michael Niedermayer <michaelni at gmx.at> wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 01:12:54PM +0100, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
>> On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 12:54:48PM +0100, Herv? W. wrote:
>> > On 19/01/2011, Michael Niedermayer <michaelni at gmx.at> wrote:
> [...]
>> > > Of course its their full right to fork if they see the need for that but
>> > > thats
>> > > not exactly what they did.
>> > >
>> > > And that I and everyone i spoke with dont even know the reason behind this
>> > > move
>> >
>> > Have you asked any of the undersigned of "[FFmpeg-devel] [ANNOUNCE]
>> > New FFmpeg maintainership" ?
>>
>> maybe not but they surely have seen me asking here in public and can awnser
>> here
>
> Apparently not a single developer who signed this feels the need to say why.
> They are all subscribed and all have read this

A) you are stubborn. When you have an opinion, it is
hard-to-impossible to convince you otherwise. I'll openly admit that
that's not scientific evidence (one way or another) whether we gave
any proper reason to convince you otherwise.
B) you fight a lot with people. These fights are persistent, get
personal and it is hard to get you to reconciliate. That's not what I
expect of a leader. You, of all, should be the first to offer a
gesture, no matter how symbolic, to fix things up.
C) overabundance of votes, micro-optimizing reviews and
discussions/fights lead to absence of actual development (not just by
you, also by others). This leads to x264 being done outside (which is
fine - but now if I want to contribute there, I get attacked), our aac
encoder being a little bit of a joke (sorry Alex, but you openly admit
this yourself). Seriously, how much FFmpeg development (not review)
did you do lately?
D) mplayer != ffmpeg. I see that this is hard for you to accept, but
they are not the same. This includes swscale, mpcodecs, dll loader and
all the other endless flamewars.
E) you should be on IRC, it's been asked repeatedly.

Having said all this, I don't want you to stop developing FFmpeg, but
that's exactly what I want you to do again: write code. Not mpcodecs
wrappers, but actual FFmpeg code. I think there's a lot of reasons why
you're not the ideal BDFL, but you are a great programmer and I'd wish
you did more of that.

> I guess i did not spend enough years of my life working on ffmpeg to deserve
> an awnser

<troll>
I wish this impatience had been more apparent when some developers
asked you to reconciliate with Mans, Diego or Attilla...
</troll>

Ronald