[FFmpeg-devel] [VOTE] Equality and leader team

Michael Niedermayer michaelni
Sat Feb 5 12:31:25 CET 2011


Hi everyone

Since the coup at the 18 jan 2011, we have a group of 7 who actively review,
test and commit changes.
Having more people review and test changes is a good thing, and we want that
to continue.
But this was not the only change, with the coup, final decission power as
well as commit rights have been restricted to these 7 people as well.
Locking all file maintainers out and in many cases (libmpeg2 reader removial,
h264 encoder removial, ...) overriding file maintainer decissions.
Ronald, stated (see Subject: Re: [FFmpeg-devel] Compromise) that he does not
even want 10 new commiters this year.

It was said the new system is similar to the linux kernel, but really it has
nothing to do with it. Linus and Andrew have not been locked out of the
process by 7 of their friends and asked to send patches.
Nor are file maintainers locked out of their repositories where they worked
previously together.
Linux development is if it can be described in one word, evolutional, its
not forced by coups. And with disagreements and tools like git to which we
just very recently switched also comes the natural and gradual change to a
differnet development model of pulling changes and having more repositories.
Trying to force such a change while at the same time trying to push oneself
to the top of the pyramid is bound to lead to disaster in the long run.

In terms of stability, the new 7 commiter team commited a whole mail thread
by mistake
<BBB> huh?
<BBB> what happened
<mru> you put the entire quoted thread in the commit message

And broke compilation by apparently not bothering to test the code
Subject: Re: [FFmpeg-devel] [FFmpeg-commits] wtv: filesystem implementation

These are things that where very rare before when everyone had write access.

And to quote ronald on what happens if you disagree with him:
"What happens if we disagree? I hope that we can come to a consensus.
 Plus of course all the usual, what if I break the build? Etc., but
 that's obvious. Yes I'm purposefully not going into the "what if we
 can't come to a consensus", because I don't want to start another
 bitchfight already."

Because of all these, iam starting a simple vote that is targeted to fix the
worst of it with the smallest change that appears to me sufficient.
The worst is that many people leave ffmpeg entirely. And i myself would have
done that too had i not been offered money for future work on ffmpeg.


* Disband the leader team of 7 and return commit and decission power to all
  developers.

Y Yes
N No

Id like to emphasize that Y returns the power to all developers NOT return
any leader power to me.
I also repeat that this is not about changing the system, this vote is just
about removing an un-equality amongth the developers, it says nothing about
which system developers would experiment with, change to or finally keep.

All ffmpeg developers, aka everyone who had a svn write account can vote.
The vote ends when there are no new votes received for a period of 7 days.

-- 
Michael     GnuPG fingerprint: 9FF2128B147EF6730BADF133611EC787040B0FAB

Libert?, ?galit?, fraternit?
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