[FFmpeg-devel] IRC meeting on Saturday 2015-09-12, UTC 15:00

Ronald S. Bultje rsbultje at gmail.com
Thu Sep 10 20:58:51 CEST 2015


Hi,

On Thu, Sep 10, 2015 at 1:46 PM, Michael Niedermayer <michaelni at gmx.at>
wrote:

> On Mon, Sep 07, 2015 at 11:37:47AM +0200, Stefano Sabatini wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I propose to have an official IRC meeting on the next Saturday, and I
> > propose the tentative time of 15:00 UTC, but feel free to propose a
> > different time if this can't suit you.
> >
> > The IRC meeting channel will be public and the log will be published
> > at the end of the meeting.
> >
> > This meeting is also meant as a preparation for the real-life meeting
> > that will be held in Paris at the next VDD
> > (http://www.videolan.org/videolan/events/vdd15/) for the FFmpeg
> > developers who will attend it.
> >
> > I propose these topics of the day (suggested by ubitux on IRC):
> > 1. ABI compatibility policy
>
> > 2. general policy decision process
>
> heres a suggestion, maybe useful as input for discussions on
> Saturday ...
>
> FFmpeg used and uses "unanimous consent" in patch reviews
> any person could make a suggestion
> to improve a patch and it has to be taken care of one way or another
> before the patch is ok. This system worked quite well almost all the
> time. So i would suggest to use the same / a similar system for
> policy decisions
>
> * Everyone should be able to comment and propose options/choices
> * There should be enough time to understand, discuss and amend
>   proposals
> * People should try to understand the other people and avoid strawman
>   arguments and other non constructive discussion tactics, people/the
>   commuity should step in if discussions become non constructive and
>   hostile and try to get people back toward constructive discussion.
> * People should be able to declare reservations to a proposal without
>   blocking the proposal and as a seperate choice veto it in a blocking
>   fashion. A veto should be public with full name of the developer,
>   reason why it is bad for the community/project and ideally a
>   alternative proposal. Also developers vetoing a proposal must be
>   willing and able to work on finding an better solution.


I have serious reservations about giving each developer veto rights; imho,
we need a much higher bar than that. As evidence, I would like to offer the
example of the united nations security council having only 5 members with
veto power, and that's working out really well, right? </sarcasm> So in
light of that, if we decide to go this route, I would humbly suggest to
make sure our number of developers with veto power is significantly smaller
than five. "Use it wisely" won't work, power corrupts. Let's fix it by
design.

Ronald


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