[MPlayer-dev-eng] Commit rules and coexistence rules

[Luca Barbato]

In the cvslog ml you may dig a thread in which we got lots of drama, 
flames and assorted complaints.

I perceive the main issue being the intolerance to less understood rules 
and scarce ability to get the rules accepted.

Let's try to address this before nuking Uoti out and other actions that 
I consider not completely good.

Let's start with the commit rules.

Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 04, 2008 at 05:34:13PM +0200, Luca Barbato wrote:
> These remove comments, remove outcommented code, ...
> this definitly is not what indent does and its just what i quickly spotted

Ok, I overlook that mostly because is a big patch, you are right.

> And thats why such commits are so bad and why we all complain, they are a
> nightmare to review, you missed the things above, others missed them too.
> What if there where security related changes? Intentionally placed
> buffer overflows or some, send /etc/shadow to badguy at badplace.com?
> All code that goes into svn has to be reviewed or mplayer will become a
> time bomb. Its trivial to get a svn account if one wanted to do something
> nasty, reviews are the only way to avoid such issues.

I think we could start a revision of rules and just say that
- A commit should be easy to review so it should be:
   - small
   - do not mix unrelated changes in a single lump
   - possibly easy to follow
- A commit message should be meaningful and to the point
   - Terse enough
   - Explain what the patch does.

- Exceptions could could go in if:
   - They are discussed before
   - They cannot be split w/out breaking functionality in the
     intermediate commits.

Rules should help us getting things done and we should find them 
reasonable and fair.

Uoti finds some of them annoying and cannot see the point of some of 
them. I think most of them have a point but they should be clarified so 
they can be understood by everybody.

lu

-- 

Luca Barbato
Gentoo Council Member
Gentoo/linux Gentoo/PPC
http://dev.gentoo.org/~lu_zero