[vlc-devel] [vlc-commits] src: Fix for Mac OS X filesystem filename encoding

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

On Thu, 22 Aug 2013 17:12:48 +0200, "Steinar H. Gunderson"
<sgunderson at bigfoot.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 22, 2013 at 05:01:11PM +0200, Rémi Denis-Courmont wrote:
>>>> This is not verbal abuse.
>>> Others certainly perceive it as such.
>> Not my problem. I have had more than enough of being blamed for
negative
>> reviews and pointing out problems.
> 
> Note that nobody's complaining about you pointing out problems; they're
> complaining about the tone.

My underlying assumption is that a negative critic cannot have a positive
or even neutral tone to what appear to be your standards. Or maybe it can,
but it would fall within the realm of hypocrisy and/or sarcasm to my
standards.

>> If you think the tone is inappropriate, maybe you should ponder why
does
>> it always have to be me doing the complaining? Maybe then you'd realize
>> just how frustrating this is to *me*.
> 
> I must admit that I don't think a lot of people consider your right
> (whether justified or not) to vent your frustration when they judge
> whether an environment is pleasant to stay in or not.

The fact is that it is never pleasant to have your patches rejected, or to
read complaints about your commits. It makes quite little difference what
the tone is or is perceived to be. I am well aware that we have lost more
than one contributor because of that.

But what is the alternative? We could have kept the promiscuous patch
merging habits and low acceptance standards we had way back when. The
current versions would be even less stable than 0.8.5 was. We would have
lost most of our user base, and probably many contributors (including
myself). It would certainly be a more inclusive and accessible project, but
I do not think it would be better overall.

I fully appreciate (in the neutral sense) that the project is increasingly
hard to get into. That is a common and qutie natural tendency among
maturing open-source communities. Unfortunately, while some projects
compensate their mounting standards by big investments in software
engineering, VLC is unable to do so. I do not know any solution to this
problem.

(...)
> You can say that it is unacceptable to break the
> test suite without having to resort to personal attacks.

I made no personal attack this time. There is an unfortunate but pragmatic
approach that we do merge bad patches knowingly due to constraints, such as
an impeding release. Asking why this is done seems perfectly reasonable to
me, all the more when third party reverts have been banned.

> I do not know whether your emails were _meant_ as such, but they
> certainly do not always come across as as constructive as they could
have
> been. That is, to me, anyway.

Oh sure. If I were not already spending much more of my free time than I
wanted writing emails and reviewing patches, I could make more constructive
reviews. But I do spend it already and I am not allowed to use my paid
time, so do not expect any improvements.

>> But this is the contributor with the longest history among all active
>> ones. That does not add up.
> 
> So, if it does not add up, maybe you would get things fixed just as
easily
> just by saying “It looks like this patch broke the test suite, could you
> take a look?”.

Really, it goes without saying that one should run the test suite before
pushing. It adds just a few seconds to the build time.

-- 
Rémi Denis-Courmont
Sent from my collocated server