[FFmpeg-devel] [DECISION] Include more developers in the voting committee

Nicolas George george at nsup.org
Fri Sep 25 18:02:51 CEST 2015


<snip>

As much as I find it gratifying for my ego to see you all welcome us back
like that, I must say all your votes are both invalid, and, fortunately,
unnecessary. :) Well, this is an unimportant technicality for now, but if we
are to use this system, we better understand it correctly.

The votes are unnecessary because the motion, if the deadline was before all
the answers, would have been validated: it has one supporter (Clément,
implicitly), and no opposition: that is 1/0 > 3/2. This kind of vote was
meant, in my mind, to validate decisions that have already been discussed
and/or for which there is no real doubt about the outcome: make sure
nobody's advice has been neglected. Ideally, the call to vote should contain
all the votes already.

The votes are invalid because they should be direct answer to Clément's
call, not to ping nor to each other, and because they are supposed to be
motivated, so just "+1" does not count.

The requirement to be a direct answer is to avoid votes to be lost: a branch
of the thread after the call could devolve into endless bikeshedding, we do
not want to re-read all of it to find a vote hidden in it.

The requirement that the votes are motivated is to avoid casual opposition
or support: at least give it half a minute thought to write a sentence. No
such requirement exist for formal votes. I just thought it was best like
that.

Of course, all of this are just a proposal from me, it can be discussed and
changed. I just think people should understand it well before approving it.

Also, this is not a normal vote, it is a solemn occasion with symbolic
value: validating it with more than silence is nice. But I think we should
save that for when the list is really complete.


Actually, I was thinking of another way of bootstraping the decision
process, but since Clément had already started something I kept quiet. As I
am already ranting, here it is, just for entertainment:

People who consider themselves active FFmpeg developers should send a patch
adding themselves to the list:

# Author: Nicolas George <george at nsup.org>
# 
#     doc: add myself as FFmpeg developer
#     
#     I follow the discussions on the mailing-list,
#     react to the issues in parts of the code where I am maintainer,
#     although I have other projects taking my time I produce a few
#     patches, I intend to contribute more soon.
# 
# --- a/doc/avfilter.txt
# +++ b/doc/developers.txt
# +Nicolas George <george at nsup.org> (2010-2015)

When everybody has done so, we would all approve it, and then squash
everything and someone could commit. (Active status could be ensured by a
yearly commit to update the year range.)

I am confident this would converge and allow unanimity.

If Margaret Thatcher were to crawl out of her grave and pretend she's a
FFmpeg developer, everybody else would agree that "no, you're not". This is
an extreme example, of course, but I believe that if a troll were to try
this occasion to get access, there would be easy consensus to reject them,
enough to convince the Libre multimedia community.

Actually, I would rather fear the opposite: that people would feel shy and
not propose themselves, "I have only proposed ten patches in the last four
week, I am not active."

Regards,

-- 
  Nicolas George
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