[MPlayer-dev-eng] Cleaning up incoming

[Uoti Urpala]

On Sun, 2009-12-20 at 15:11 +0100, Reimar Döffinger wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 20, 2009 at 02:38:43PM +0200, Uoti Urpala wrote:
> > On Sun, 2009-12-20 at 13:10 +0100, Attila Kinali wrote:
> > > On Fri, 18 Dec 2009 20:37:10 +0100
> > > Reimar Döffinger <Reimar.Doeffinger at gmx.de> wrote:
> > > 
> > > > 1) incoming could be on a smaller partition, forcing us to clean up before
> > > > we have such a huge mess
> > > > 2) sorting things into samples would actually have a real visible benefit:
> > > > making space in incoming.
> > > 
> > > Good idea. I'll do that after the clean up.
> > 
> > I'm against that. Making the partition smaller to intentionally cause
> > out-of-space problems is just that - intentionally and unnecessarily
> > causing problems where none existed before.
> 
> No, it solves the problems of people leaving (possibly important) samples
> in incoming until nobody knows anymore what they were there for and why.

You're claiming it would "solve" the problems, but the only thing it'd
directly do is cause _much worse_ problems. Ability to upload new
samples is much higher priority than keeping years-old samples, so
endangering the former for the sake of the latter is a bad idea.

You're obviously hoping that incoming running out of space would
motivate people to sort the samples. There are two main problems with
this that you haven't addressed. First, it might not actually work that
way: incoming could become full without anyone doing cleanup, uploading
new samples would be impossible, and you would have caused a lot of
harm. Second, even if it did make someone work on sorting samples, you'd
have to justify why this was a good thing. A sorted samples collection
would no doubt be beneficial, but is it _the_ most important thing that
someone could work on? Who'd in practice do the sorting, and would that
person be able to do something more important instead? Is organizing the
samples important enough to artificially make it urgent, likely to
unnecessarily conflict with people's schedules, just to get them to work
on it?

To me this looks like a case of a fairly common fallacy: after you
recognize a flaw in something it bothers you and you feel you have to
somehow fix it, failing to recognize that equivalent effort would bring
greater benefits elsewhere. I don't consider the advantages of sorting
samples over just deleting the oldest ones to be significant enough to
make it a top priority thing to do. And even if more work on organizing
the samples would be beneficial, endangering the ability to upload new
samples for that is a case of the cure being worse than the disease.