meritocracy (was: Re: [MPlayer-cvslog] r22386 - trunk/DOCS/tech/new_policy.txt)

[Ivan Kalvachev]

2007/3/3, Michael Niedermayer <michaelni at gmx.at>:
> Hi
>
> On Sat, Mar 03, 2007 at 11:06:46AM +0100, Diego Biurrun wrote:
> [...]
> > Meritocracy for me means that if you have been doing all the work over
> > an extended period of time then you should eventually get to make the
> > decisions, rather than being told what to do by a boss or committee.
>
> yes, i fully agree as long as the decissions are contained in the part on
> which the person works, that is coding style or implementation details should
> be the developers decission but
> as soon as the decissions significantly affect things outside the area where
> the specific developer is working on it is no longer just his decission but
> the decission of all affected people
> some examples would be
> * writing code which requires a more specific compiler than before (this
>   affects the whole project not just the specific subpart on which the
>   developer works)
> * writing slow, very inefficient or bloated code ...
> * adding exploits, goatse pics, ...
> * writing code which is very hard to maintain or even unmaintainable
>   that is code noone except a single person understands
> * checking in mixtures of several changes with a size >200k this makes
>   future maintaince, debugging and reviewing of the change very hard
> * in case of docs for example if you would decide to change to ms-word
>   then even with you writing >90% of them i would not accept it as it
>   simply would make the docs inaccessable to too many people
>
> in the cases above it should not just be the specific developers decission
> what to do!
>
> [...]
> > > so who was best at being maintainer? i think arpi was better than the
> > > current root team, thats just my oppinion nothing more and nothing less
> >
> > This is a logical fallacy.  The current root team is not the project
> > leader, hence they cannot be worse at being project leader.
>
> the current root team is the one who make the final decission on who
> gets or looses their svn account (they have overridden the project developers
> democratic oppinion and at that point have de facto become leader

I would use the word dictator.