[MPlayer-cvslog] r26411 - trunk/libmpdemux/demuxer.c

[The Wanderer]

Benjamin Zores wrote:

> So yes, if you want my opinion, Uoti may have broken some rules (who
> the hell defined them after all, probably not a whole team)

AFAIR, they were defined by suggestion and consensus over the course of
time.

If you think there's a problem with the current rules, you can and
probably should push for them to be changed - but when your adherence or
lack thereof to the rules affects other people, you are not justified in
ignoring the rules while they exist.

If what Uoti, Diego, yourself, and perhaps a few other people are saying
is correct - if the bulk of the developers, particularly of the active
developers, do not care about the rules which have been being broken -
then there is little enough support for those rules that it would
probably be easy to get them changed. As far as I can tell, however, no
attempt to change them by consensus - or even by majority - has been
made; I do not recall even a suggestion of a specific change, much less
a posted patch.

What Uoti is doing is simply ignoring the rules he does not like. He is
no more justified in that than I would, if I still had commit access or
were sending in patches, be in ignoring the rules I don't like - and
there is indeed at least one rule I think is stupid to the point of
being offensive.

I do not think that Diego (or the rest of root) would unilaterally
change the rules (i.e. commit a substantive change to one of the
relevant files) without consulting the developer base - but, by refusing
to enforce the rules not only when violations are seen but when people
specifically ask for those rules to be enforced, that is exactly what he
is effectively doing: changing the rules on his own authority, and
worse, doing so without that change being visible to someone who goes
looking for the rules.

I am emphatically not in favor of a hard "no exceptions" approach to
rules; there must always be wiggle room, and it should always be
possible to ask for consensus about letting the rules not apply in a
particular case. I would, furthermore, probably support ignoring a rule
when doing so does not in practice affect anyone beyond the person
ignoring it. That does *not*, however, justify simply unilaterally
ignoring rules which *do* affect other people.

> but all he wanted to do is contribute for the good of MPlayer and
> imho, he can't be blamed for that.

No, he can't.

He *can*, however, be blamed for refusing to accept the rules
(responsibilities) which go along with the privileges of having commit
access to the MPlayer repository.

I am of the opinion that no single developer of any project, with the
possible exception of one who would be capable of carrying the entire
project on his or her own, can possibly make contributions valuable
enough to outweigh actively rejecting the rules which govern the
project. Refraining from violating those rules while pushing for them to
be changed would be more than acceptable; violating them whenever one
sees fit, much less while not even trying to get them changed, is
emphatically not so.

> Ironically, I see that some of the people who asked for his account
> revocation may indeed follow these rules, as the few times they
> actually commit something, they have few chances to break them (and
> no I won't give names, even under torture :-)

My only comment on this is more a response to Diego: it's not exactly
fair to count Michael's low MPlayer commit numbers in the same way as
those of the others, since his primary area of activity is FFmpeg, and
commits there are at least as valuable to MPlayer as commits in the
MPlayer repository itself...

-- 
       The Wanderer

Warning: Simply because I argue an issue does not mean I agree with any
side of it.

Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny.