[FFmpeg-devel] (trying to be) a voice of reason

[madshi]

2011/3/14 Luca Barbato <lu_zero at gentoo.org>
> I spent lots of time trying to make the whole situation
> less annoying, before the change we had people more
> and more demotivated, most of the people from the
> original announce were thinking about forking. The
> number was bigger than expected, when michael
> asked to remove the automatic checks for the style
> change the C votes got counted and we decided to
> just change the maintainership instead of forking,
> hoping that code instead of discussion would do the
> difference.
> In the past two months we tried to tune the commit
> process and in the mean time we tried to come up
> with a document stating the direction in a clearer
> way, we asked comments and reviews on the first
> draft that came up while discussing at fosdem while
> Michael mostly insulted Ronald and others while
> picking their patch for his tree soon later.
> Now we got this dns change so I guess now we can
> just fork as we should do 4 months ago instead of
> wasting time discussing with Michael.

What you say sounds more or less reasonable to me.
But why then do ugly stuff like fighting over the logo,
or shutting down the ffmpeg-devel lists right now?
That kind of behaviour just makes you look bad.

IMHO you should first have tried to setup a vote
everybody could agree with. If that had failed, you
should have forked instead of trying the takeover.
That would have resulted in much less bad blood.

I still think we should try to setup a vote now. But
with you guys shutting down the ffmpeg mailing
lists it seems you don't care. That's too bad, really.

Best regards, Mathias.