[vlc-devel] Re: vlc: svn commit r12294 (courmisch)

[Christophe Massiot]

On Mon, Aug 22, 2005, Sam Hocevar wrote:

> > Bullying youngsters like me might be OK (though not from a moral
> > standpoint in any case) if there actually were a lots of people involved
> > at the moment.
> 
>    Do not play the victim when at the same time you make patronising
> remarks to those who question your changes. Your involvement in the
> development has reached a point where you can no longer hide behind a
> "yougster" label when you do mistakes.

And I do not have the impression that we keep bullying "youngsters". In
fact we are one of the most tolerant projects I have ever known, raising
only mild protestation when everything is broken. It's in our tradition
to understand that everybody makes mistake, and that yelling at them
only drives potential contributors away. We're only asking contributors
to pay a little attention not to break other people's work. I have been
in this project since 1998 and I don't think we have ever bullied
someone in a non-constructive way, and certainly not because he was a
new contributor. I am sure that otherwise we wouldn't have so many
external contributors.

If you want to see how differently things can be handled, go and see the
ffmpeg-devel mailing-list.

> > Alas, with Laurent, Gildas and yourself seemingly much less
> > dedicated than you all used to be, VideoLAN is severely short of people.
> 
>    Then your constant breaking of the build system is not the way to
> keep the few remaining people, especially the porters. Also, it had not
> occurred to me that changing the build system was VLC's most needed fix.

I second this. These past few days VLC build system or runtime have been
broken most of the time. That means the other contributors must wait
until it is fixed, or revert the changes which have been made. This is
not tolerable in the long run since people start spending more time
fixing what's just been broken than actually develop new features. It is
just a matter of common courtesy to allow them to work in good
conditions. I am not blaming it on anyone, and that would not be
constructive, but I must ask everyone to pay a little more attention to
what they check in.

Don't misunderstand me though, ground-breaking contributions are of
course welcome, but if they mean they could break other people's work, 
and for some reason you can't hold your code on your hard drive and have
to check it in somewhere, we usually ask to check in in a dedicated
branch. That's what we have done in the past with version 0.5.0 and
sam's object environment, and that's what sam's just been doing for his
build system experiment. Distribution of parallel patches "for testing"
before checking them in is also a good idea, and I would be glad to
test such patches on the three distributions I am currently working.

-- 
Christophe Massiot.

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