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

[Diego Biurrun]

On Wed, Jan 02, 2008 at 11:53:45PM +0100, Balatoni Denes 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.

The MPlayer codebase is improving.  There are still more than enough
rough edges, but they are much less than there used to be.  However,
this cannot be an excuse for dropping all quality standards.

I don't really see any obvious advantages to your approach.
Contributors that are willing to go through multiple review rounds and
adapt to local standards make much better team players and are more
likely to be accepted as committers later on.

> > 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.

I did not mean to say that I or anybody else is wishing for less
contributions.  This is absolutely not the case.  However, since the
committer/reviewer manpower is limited, the number of patches that get
merged stays roughly the same.  Receiving 3 times or 10 times that
number in contributions does not make a difference in the sense that it
does not affect the number of merged patches.

Diego