[vlc-devel] Report of potential Code of Conduct violation

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Le 8 septembre 2024 21:10:37 GMT+03:00, "Fatih Uzunoğlu" <fuzun54 at outlook.com> a écrit :
> Bigger mistakes deserve harsher criticism.

Perhaps but then only to a small extent. I don't think an honest rookie mistake deserves as harsh a critic as the same mistake made by an experienced developer who's already been warned multiple times prior.

Indeed, if a grave mistake is made by a junior developer, it's really to be blamed on their mentor, whoever merged the code without adequate review, and/or whoever came up with such a flawed development workflow that it was allowed to happen, IMO.

>> We as a project should and need to be interested of well-being of the
>> patch authors, as those are the people who put time and effort on the
>> project. That includes you too.
>
>A grown up man should not be offended by criticism. If that impairs well-being of the author, yes, I believe that is the problem of that person. This is not a kindergarten.

You can't have it both ways.

In this particular thread, there is no question to me that Prince amply crossed the line between harsh criticism and personal attack and so-called character assassination. If someone wrote that about me, I'd be furious.

But when you write that "X is the worse T since Y", without an objective metric to back that allegation, it's unnecessarily harsh wording that is likely to hurt the feelings and mental wellbeing of whoever made X. As I already wrote, I do consider that this is acceptable, unlike some later statements in that thread, but barely.

And for the record, number of known regressions is *not* an objective metric. We don't have a clear-cut definition of what constitutes separate bugs versus duplicate symptom report of the same root-causal bug.

(...)

>On the other hand, the subject author seems to _clearly_ breached the rules. Even if I happen to breach the rules, that still does not justify subsequent toxic behavior.
>
>And if I create garbage merge requests, then yes, I would like people to be harsh towards me so that I naturally be more careful the next time.

That I can only agree with.