[MPlayer-dev-eng] Cleaning up incoming

[Uoti Urpala]

On Sun, 2009-12-20 at 16:23 +0100, Erik Auerswald wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 20, 2009 at 05:07:02PM +0200, Uoti Urpala wrote:
> > [...snip...]
> > 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?
> 
> This totally misses the point. Sorting the samples is an important task
> that should be encouraged. If someone wants to go ahead and do it, then
> this is great.

You misunderstood my point. I don't want to discourage sorting the
samples, and of course I'm not saying it's a bad thing to do! However I
think there are lots of other potentially useful things to do. If you
want to use very "heavy-handed" means such as letting incoming fill up
to "force" work on this particular task then it's not enough to say it's
"important and should be encouraged". To justify such means you'd need
to explain why it's _more_ important than all the other stuff.

Or from a somewhat different viewpoint: if you try to "force" people to
work on something then the task getting done, even if that's useful in
itself, does NOT automatically justify your actions and mean they were
beneficial overall.

> > [...snip...]
> > 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.
> 
> Uoti, here you have stepped into a common trap: Just because someone
> would like to fix a problem, you have no reason at all to expect him to
> fix a different problem instead. This is even more true in open-source
> projects.

This is again a misinterpretation. Your reply could have been
appropriate if Reimar had said "I want to work on sorting samples and
will be doing that" and I'd replied "you should work on this thing X
instead" (though IMO that wouldn't _always_ be wrong either). But this
wasn't about whether someone should be _allowed_ to work on samples, it
was about forcing focus on them in a way that could easily affect
_others_.