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

[The Wanderer]

(I'm not sure I'm completely awake yet, but hopefully I've managed to
avoid making any terrible mistakes this time.)

Uoti Urpala wrote:

> On Sat, 2008-05-10 at 10:14 -0400, The Wanderer wrote:
> 
>> Then it's entirely possible that the rules as they are presently
>> defined (or possibly ill-defined) may be out of date, and it may be
>> appropriate to update them - ideally with consensus from the entire
>> development team, preferably at least with the support of a
>> majority, and certainly with public discussion beforehand.
> 
> My goal is not to make a different set of rules and then strictly
> follow those, but to make people stop treating any set of written
> rules as the ultimate authority.

I'm not sure if I understand what you mean by "ultimate authority" here.

I've only managed to come up with two interpretations, one of which is
more or less exactly the same as my already-stated "there must be room
for exceptions" (i.e., everything must be considered on a case-by-case
basis, rather than mindlessly applying the rules), the other of which
makes this more or less equivalent to attempting to eliminate "rules"
entirely.

>> It is *not* appropriate to simply ignore them, unless the idea is
>> to throw the rules out wholesale and not put anything else in their
>> place - that is, to move to a situation of "no rules at all".
> 
> To me this paragraph seems to indicate that you don't have a
> realistic view of the situation. Some rules are already ignored;

Then that is inappropriate, and either they should be enforced, or the
rules should be changed to reflect reality.

> and more important, it's not the rules which prevent people from
> doing harmful things.

No; it's the judgment and consciences of individual developers. What the
rules do is provide criteria, ideally gathered by consensus from the
developers en masse, for what to do when individual developers disagree.
Without rules, whenever there was such a disagreement the question would
have to be put to the developers at large, which would result in
duplication of effort if the same question arose more than once and
which could easily result in different, er, results just based on who
happened to get involved each time - and which would, in any case, be
quite time-consuming. Gathering the answers the first time the question
arises (or the first time it becomes apparent that it is a common
question), recording them someplace 'official', and then updating that
record when it becomes appropriate to do so is simply a way of 'caching
the results', as it were.

Note also, please, that the definition of "harm" is a complicated issue,
and may be considered to be very broad. By some standards - of
difficulty of review, difficulty of reading the commit history, and I
think at least one other thing I've forgotten - your own commit which
started this thread would be considered harmful.

(For that matter, by some standards any commit at all to code someone
else is working on could be considered harmful, because it could require
the someone else to do extra work to allow their changes to have the
desired effect - or could even render those changes moot entirely. This
is probably beyond the limit of what I would consider valid to include
in the definition, but that is part of the reason to have rules to spell
out where the boundaries are.)

> "No rules at all" does not equal "everyone is free to erase all files
> in the repository or do any other idiotic thing".

If there were no rules at all, then yes, everyone with the ability to do
so would be free to do so. The fact is that even with no written rules,
there would almost certainly be *implicit* ones, based on individual
developers' judgment (and the consensus arising therefrom) of what is
and is not appropriate.

> There are already lots of harmful things you could do which are not
> forbidden by any rules.

I'm having a hard time thinking of many offhand which would not be
covered and prevented by the review policy...

> Rules which even tried to cover everything would need to be very
> long. Removing official rules, even those rules that make sense and
> should almost always be followed, won't make much difference overall
> as most things won't be covered by them anyway.

"Because the rules cannot cover most things, it does not make much
difference whether or not there are any rules at all." I can't quite
identify a fallacy this corresponds to, but it just seems so ludicrous
to me that if you don't see what's wrong with it I'm not sure there's
much chance of our coming to agreement.

-- 
       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.