Re: Discussing defaults (Was: [gentoo-dev] Re: [gentoo-commits] gentoo-x86 commit in virtual/ffmpeg: ffmpeg-9.ebuild ChangeLog ffmpeg-0.10.2-r1.ebuild)

[Peter Stuge]

Alexis,

Alexis Ballier wrote:
> All of this because ~10 people cannot work together, well, really,
> thank you :)

Do you have experience from being in a similar situation? You are
being quite judgemental.

There are absolutely situations where people so different that
cooperation simply can't work. It's pretty lame, but unless you
yourself participate at least on the same level as everyone else
(on both sides) you really don't get much of a say.

It's easy to tell people to "stop fighting, just get along" - but
I believ that intentional fighting is quite rare. It's more likely
about trying to make one's point.

That requires communication, but communication is not always
possible. (I don't mean transmissions back and forth, I mean
desire to understand the transmissions.)

For a long time I idealized open source as being an ideal community,
where communication always worked because everyone wanted it to. But
that's unfortunately not at all the case.


> Can you point out any important problem?

I suppose the problem is that "it is not done yet" like Greg
sometimes says about things that are being worked on in the kernel.

Of course when a work-in-progress is published and someone
desperately wants to use it they will try to use it as soon as
possible, and if they are unhelpful they will complain and/or run
off in their own direction without receiving anyone's communication.

If this has happened to you, you will know that such events teach you
never to do any work in the open, ie. only publish code when you
think that it is completely done. On the other hand you may still
want to have feedback during your work. A perfect conflict of
interest, which is quite annoying and distracting.


> how open source work

And how it sometimes doesn't work at all. I mean: It is not useful.

In an ideal world people would work more together. Sometimes that
simply isn't possible.


> > I have no opinion, I stayed out of the discussion and decision about
> > that before because I know I have a bias. I let other people decide.
>
> Note: If pro-libav people would be doing the work of fixing the tree
> and ensuring *everything* works with libav I would not mind at all
> what the default is.

I think this is completely fair! Thanks for that.


> I consider FFmpeg superior, but can understand there are different
> opinions, however, if this is to lower the tree quality

Quality is not a very helpful metric, because it means completely
different things for different people. Some people value code
readability, maintainability, and correctness very high, other people
value having a new idea halfway implemented and released even if it
only kindasorta works and is not at all reliable and not on par with
previous parts of the code.

I see a tendency in myself and in others to not care about what
happens on the inside when thinking merely as a user. I see many many
people complain about the insides when they are not happy with how it
performs. I very rarely see people actually dig in to help fix up the
insides. The same pattern exists in pretty much all projects that I
know of, and it is quite natural - there are more users than
developers.


> then it is obvious libav shouldn't be the default.

It may be obvious to you, but please remember that others may (are
likely to!) have a different metric.


> libav should realize they are the actual fork (this is now pretty
> clear since the takeover failed and ffmpeg didn't collapse...) and
> also rename their libraries so that the internal libav/ffmpeg
> fights would not affect their users anymore and projects could use
> what they think best...

Unless libav considers the API too broken to still be functional I
don't see the point of differentiation. A little bit of competition
can be good overall even though it is more stressful for both sides.
The most important thing is what I asked for already -

That users inform themselves, and make informed decisions.


Anything else is really just an excuse not to have to form, voice,
and defend an opinion - take a stand - which IMO is just as lame as
~10 people who cannot work together.


//Peter