[FFmpeg-devel] IRC meeting

[Ganesh Ajjanagadde]

On Jun 4, 2016 09:45, "Michael Niedermayer" <michael at niedermayer.cc> wrote:
>
> CCing lukasz and ganesh ...
> so they can correct what we misremember if they want, also dont want
> to speak about people behind their back ...
>
> On Sat, Jun 04, 2016 at 12:26:22PM -0300, James Almer wrote:
> > On 6/4/2016 7:33 AM, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> > > On Sat, Jun 04, 2016 at 10:30:32AM +0200, Piotr Bandurski wrote:
> > >> Hi,
> > >>
> > >> The problem with this project is that it has not enough active
developers. It looks like most of the devs swiched into "stand-by" mode or
something
> > >> and sadly no new people are joining in to push development forward ;)
> > >
> > > There where new developers but i have the feeling many of them where
> > > treated rather hostile by the community until they decreased activity
> > > or disappeared examples are lukasz
> >
> > I don't know enough about his case aside from i think there being
> > differences with other devs regarding his GSoC 2015 mentored project
> > for me to comment.
>
> I think there where more cases than GSoC itself
> rather a general opposition to some network / ffm / ffserver related
> work. Leaving several areas unmaintained now as a result.
>
> IMO no matter how much one disagrees with someone elses work
> if one doesnt intend to do a better job oneself, one should be humble
> and polite with critique or at least not "shit at one" until he leaves
>
>
> >
> > ganesh
> >
> > There was no hostility towards him. He basically left after a handful
> > of patches he sent were rejected for technical reasons.

The timeline statement is correct. As for hostility, this is incorrect,
even when restricted to public activity on ffmpeg-devel.

But this was not the reason for leaving. The reason for leaving, which I
previously conveyed to Michael privately, is that I lack time for this work
these days.

Put in other words, even if FFmpeg was "perfect" as a community, whatever
that means, I still would have left roughly around this time. Exact timing
was a result of a combination of multiple things that are really irrelevant.

>
> IMHO
> our failure as a community was IIUC that we failed to make him part
> of our team / be more welcoming instead we argued publically if he
> should have a git write account. And we failed to "mentor"/"help"
> him to work on something he liked and we needed. What happened
> was he did good work that was rejected because we kind of didnt
> need/want it.

This mentoring/elaboration of project needs would have been very helpful. I
basically did whatever I wanted to, with limited suggestions from the
community until a few months back, at which time it was too late for me.
IMHO a file with to-do points at least at a high level that most devs agree
upon as being worthy would be useful.

At the moment, even gsoc projects have strong disagreements among the
developers as to their utility.

>
> [...]
>
> --
> Michael     GnuPG fingerprint: 9FF2128B147EF6730BADF133611EC787040B0FAB
>
> The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.
> -- Aristotle