[MPlayer-cvslog] r25521 - trunk/libmpdemux/demux_ogg.c

[Ivan Kalvachev]

On Jan 3, 2008 12:53 AM, Balatoni Denes <dbalatoni at interware.hu> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> Wednesday 02 January 2008 21:01-kor Diego Biurrun ezt írta:
> > On Thu, Dec 27, 2007 at 03:10:07PM +0100, Balatoni Denes wrote:
> > > Thursday 27 December 2007 12:44-kor Diego Biurrun ezt írta:
> >
> > There is no doubt that contributing to MPlayer can be a slow and tedious
> > process.  However, I disagree that this is a question of attitude.  It
> > is a matter of manpower.  We receive around an order of magnitude more
> > patches than we have time to review.
>
> You are perfectly right that manpower is an issue. But I am also critical of
> the reviewing process, where each patch is picked apart to it's last letter.
> I think it would be suffcient to point out blatant errors, and violations of
> (preferably written) policy - but not force the contributor into compliance
> in every minor (sometimes subjective) issue. It would be a form of generosity
> towards the contributor if you wish, and without mentioning the obvious
> advantages imho it also wouldn't lead to any visible or practical degradation
> to the quality of the codebase (we are talking about the mplayer codebase
> here afterall). I am sure that this point is controversial to many of you -
> but this is the compromise and attitude I have mentioned before.
>
> > So what do you call potential developer?  More contributors we do not
> > need, there are more than we can handle already.  What we need are more
> > reviewers, but these are extremely hard to come by.  Very few committers
> > review patches, much less outside their area of expertise.
>
> More reviewers would of course be needed. However I don't think that a normal
> open-source project would ever be wishing for less contributors. Better
> contributions maybe, but definietly not less.

It's kind of egg and chicken dialema.
More reviewers means more developers, and you can become developer by
having frequent and good contributions, but you can't pass your
contributions because there is nobody to review them. And because
there is nobody to review them there won't be any reviewers.

MPlayer project have serious issues from very long time. One of them
is the non-transparent and very stagnated way to promote new
developers.