[FFmpeg-devel] [ANNOUNCE] upcoming vote: extra members for GA

[James Almer]

On 11/10/2023 11:24 PM, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 09, 2023 at 11:58:29PM +0100, Jean-Baptiste Kempf wrote:
>> On Thu, 9 Nov 2023, at 23:49, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
>>> On Thu, Nov 09, 2023 at 08:30:15PM +0100, Jean-Baptiste Kempf wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Thu, 9 Nov 2023, at 19:15, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
>>>>> On Thu, Nov 09, 2023 at 07:53:33PM +0200, Rémi Denis-Courmont wrote:
>>>>>> Le torstaina 9. marraskuuta 2023, 19.41.53 EET Michael Niedermayer a écrit :
>>>>> [...]
>>>>>> If you think some people should be added, as far as I am concerned, you are of
>>>>>> course welcome to nudge them via private message to friendly remind them that
>>>>>> they can nominate themselves.
>>>>>
>>>>> so what i will do then is
>>>>> If a developer was in the GA before || are just under the threshold but
>>>>> active || are part of the infra teams and packaging
>>>>> i will leave them in the list to be added (that is also what jb suggested)
>>>>
>>>> Of course, this seems reasonable.
>>>>
>>>>> I will contact them and ask if they want to be in the GA and
>>>>
>>>> You should contact who you want, or think is necessary.
>>>> But they should step forward and say so publicly that they are candidates.
> [...]
> 
>> Also, at that time, I did not bring a list of 20 candidates who are, for the most part, inactive.
>> While asking "trust me, I will get their approval in private, but they will not speak on the mailing list".
> 
> ok, maybe we should just slow down a bit delay the vote by a few days and
> discuss this to reduce peoples anxiety? :)
> 
> Lets take a step back and look at what i suggested and discuss this a bit first
> I also have to say that this looks a bit like Xenophobia to me to be honest.

How did you even get to that conclusion?

> I hope that word has no political connotation ohh well, i guess iam now some
> right or left extremist whatever is attached to the word ATM.
> 
> And i can certainly CC someone like anton to verify what i send to people and
> what they reply. If people think i suddenly grew sozial skills to manipulate
> people or that i would be dishonest. (thx for the accusation btw)
> 
> So we have a founder who own and pays the domain. is someone against it if he
> is nominated for the GA ?

No one would be against that, at all.

> If people demand he posts in public and asks to be nominated i will not ask him
> as i am pretty sure he will not do that. I still think our GA should contain
> our founder because, hell he is our founder.

As others have pointed out, any of us can nominate anyone we think would 
be good in the GA, but if they don't personally want to be in it or care 
to be in it, does it make sense to add them to begin with? Will they 
vote at all, or will they consider the Condorcet emails as spam?

I don't mind us adding people nominated if the rest agree with said 
nomination. But adding people that we know or suspect don't care about 
the project anymore will just increase the amount of votes where a big 
percentage of enabled voters don't participate.

> 
> Also by trying to limit the GA to a closed circle the GA is not very
> general and it becomes questionable if that GA can speak for FFmpeg.
> What iam trying to say is, if you have a group of active developers that group
> can speak for what the active developers want but not what the authors of FFmpeg
> want. OTOH if you include the main authors, founder and so on the general assembly
> actually is a general assembly.

I agree with this. But i insist on the above.

> 
> then there are teh people who publically replied
> Alexander, Reimar, Hendrik
> 
> then there are people who run or pay our infra
> Baptiste Coudurier (Pays for our fate server since forever, maintains 15 things in MAINTAINERs, is the the copyright of 56 files, over 1900 commits in FFmpeg)
> Nikolay            (root admin, he has helped with uncountable many things around the server, upgrades, backups, ...)

Ok, they will clearly participate, so they are good nominations.

> 
> then there are people who are active in the last 36 month but just dont make the threshold or people from the 2020-GA
> We did send them vote mails multiple times already
> Aman Karmani       (17 authored commits in 2020-2023, recently active in 2023-June and work all over the codebase)
> Moritz Barsnick    (Member of the 2020 GA but was not on jbs list)
> Lauri Kasanen      (Linux / PowerPC maintainer)
> Dale Curtis        (14 commits in 2020 was in the 2020-GA)
> foo86              (maintainer and author of dca*, dolby_e*, dtsdec, s337m)
> Huiwen Ren         (8 matches in the codebase of his name, avs2* and related things maintainer)
> Matthieu Bouron    (over 200 commits in FFmpeg, recently active in 2022, 5 entries in MAINTAINERs, 25 in copyrights)
> Ruiling Song       (vf_tonemap_opencl maintainer, added SIMD code to various bits of code, last active in git in 2020)
> John Stebbins      (over 100 commits in FFmpeg, last active in git in 2020, 1 copyright match)
> Ting Fu            (last active in April 2023, 24 commits in 2021-2023, )
> Shiyou Yin         (MIPS & LoongArch maintainer, 24 matches for his name in the source, last commit May 2023)

 From this list, foo86 at least is AWOL, so no point adding him unless 
he resurfaces. Moritz Barsnick seems to read the list even if he very 
rarely writes, so he may be fine.
I have not looked at the rest, but feel free to nominate them if you 
think they are good for the GA.

> 
> 
> Then for who remains, i think it depends on what people demand.
> If the demand is that they must post in public, I will rest my suggestion
> to add people beyond above (who neeed no public post)
> as noone who was inactive for years is likely going to come back to ask
> for membership in the GA in their comeback mail.
> 
> OTOH if some other request system can be agreed on then i will contact
> them
> 
> Aurelien Jacobs    (over 1000 commits in FFmpeg, 13 entries in MAINTAINERs, 70 copyright line matches)
> Vitor Sessak       (over 900 commits in FFmpeg, 28 copyright matches)
> Kostya Shishkov    (over 900 commits in FFmpeg, 162 copyright matches)
> Ramiro Polla       (over 600 commits in FFmpeg, 5 matches in MAINTAINERs, 22 copyright matches)
> Alex Converse      (over 500 commits in FFmpeg, 32 copyright matches)
> Janne Grunau       (over 500 commits in FFmpeg, 24 copyright matches)
> Andreas Cadhalpun  (over 400 commits in FFmpeg, 2 copyright matches)

I'm fairly sure Kostya is doing his own thing and not interested at all 
in ffmpeg. Andreas Cadhalpun hasn't been active since 2017. Vitor Sessak 
since 2014. Aurelien Jacobs since 2018. And I see a single email from 
Janne Grunau (Although a lot of activity in dav1d).
 From this list, i think only Alex Converse makes sense, since even 
though mostly inactive, he seems to pop up every now and then and 
comment, meaning he reads the list. Maybe also Ramiro Polla and Janne 
Grunau.

So go ahead and nominate them. And please lets put an end to this 
bikeshed. The length of this email thread and amount of branches i see 
from it on my client is ridiculous, as were all the incredibly damaging 
accusations thrown around, implicitly or explicitly, for no reason.

> 
> I will not ask Lou or Martin as they left and iam fairly sure they will
> not appreciate the current environment. I do not want to drag them
> into this hostile mess
> 
> thx
> 
> [...]
> 
> 
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