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

[Diego Biurrun]

On Thu, Jan 03, 2008 at 02:50:18AM +0200, Ivan Kalvachev wrote:
> On Jan 3, 2008 12:53 AM, Balatoni Denes <dbalatoni at interware.hu> wrote:
> >
> > 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.

No doubt about this, is it enough to motivate you to review a patch
every once in a while?

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

That's unhelpful.  What we need are suggestions on how to improve
things.

Diego