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

[Uoti Urpala]

On Sun, 2008-05-11 at 07:33 -0400, The Wanderer wrote:
> Uoti Urpala wrote:
> > 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.

Your view of the role of rules here seems inconsistent with your earlier
argument that rules need to be specified in advance and a state of "no
rules" must be avoided. If you view rules as a collection of precedents
about how controversial issues were resolved in the past, meant to
reduce duplication of effort when the same issue arises again, why would
that collection have to be filled in advance?

> 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.)

IMO those issues are simply too complicated to be described by literal
rules. You can't make a rule which would forbid a significant amount of
undesirable actions without making it overbroad and also forbidding lots
of things that should be allowed.

> > "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.

Whether you call that "rules" or not is a matter of wording. Usually I
would not refer to that as "rules" like in "you must not erase all files
because there's an implicit rule against it".

> > 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...

I suppose you mean the "send patch to mplayer-dev-eng if you think the
change is going to be controversial" part. It doesn't say anything about
what effect (if any) the possible discussion on mplayer-dev-eng should
have. If you interpret it as "every change could be controversial and
requires getting full consensus first" then obviously a single developer
cannot do harmful changes, but OTOH interpreted that way it'd have
negative effects. More practical interpretations rely on the personal
judgment of developers. If you're willing to trust the their personal
judgment enough then you could say that a single rule "don't do harmful
changes" would prevent anything harmful.

> > 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.

I don't see how you could claim that to be a fallacy. IMO it's obviously
true if you take "cannot cover most" mean an insignificant enough part
can be covered, so there cannot be a flaw in the general argument. You
could try to argue that somehow the rules could cover enough to make a
big difference, but that still wouldn't show any _logical_ flaw in my
argument.