[MPlayer-dev-eng] [POLICY] clarify conditions for functionality removal

[The Wanderer]

Diego Biurrun wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 09, 2006 at 03:27:24PM -0500, The Wanderer wrote:
> 
>> My previous message, quoted above, provides my first suggestion for
>> a clarification... I could of course come up with others, but (at
>> least at first) they'd probably be rather clunkier.
> 
> Dominik just proposed a clarification, it's more or less equivalent
> to what you suggested.  I believe it should work well enough.

It's not quite equivalent - since it doesn't say *who* must provide
approval, or make any provision for overriding that, it would
theoretically allow for a situation where every developer except one has
said "NO" to a patch, and some random lurker who's never posted before
has said "I approve", and that single developer could honestly say that
he (or she - do we even have any female devs?) had received approval on
the mailing list. That it was approval from someone whose opinion should
make no practical difference doesn't change the fact that it was still
approval, which is all the rule says is required.

(Yes, more nitpicking... that's what you get for having a precisionist
as sometime in-house grammar checker.)

>> This is legalistic nitpicking, without question - but there are
>> some reasons why legalese came to exist in the first place,
> 
> But I don't think having complex legalese serves us well in the first
> place.  Ivan tried to come up with a long list of conditions and
> failed.

I didn't and don't support "a long list of conditions", and I'll almost
certainly take a certain degree of vagueness and imprecision over that
kind of exhaustive phrasing. However, I think that it *is* possible in
at least the current instance to be accurate without resorting to going
on at length about the point, and since it's possible I'd like to do it.

All I'm trying to do, at present, is to arrange for the rules to reflect
your description (which is a match for my own impression) of what
effective policy is - which is, I believe, all you yourself are trying
to do. We simply appear to disagree about what constitutes a clear
reflection of that policy.

(I could probably rant at length about the meaning and use of
"legalese", here, but I'm not sure how relevant it would be.)

> So IMO it's better to be a bit vague and leave room for
> interpretation and consensus-building.

Agreed. I don't see how the phrasing I suggested conflicts with that...

> Furthermore having long lists of rules favors obstructionism of the
> sort "No, you cannot do that, because it's against paragraph 23,
> section 42, bullet point 3b!" and requires bureaucratic overhead like
> changing the rules (with even more discussion) before action can be
> taken.

Yeah - despite having been a rules lawyer on a few occasions in the
past, I can pretty much agree with that. Explaining my exact position on
the subject would require paragraphs of text and would probably serve no
useful purpose here, so I'll leave off at that.

-- 
       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.