Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Codec project

[Alexis Ballier]

On Fri, 12 Jun 2020 10:58:24 -0400
Rich Freeman <rich0@g.o> wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 10:33 AM Alexis Ballier <aballier@g.o>
> wrote:
> >
> > What about /j #gentoo-media, discuss, join the current projects,
> > get a few things done (there is a lot of choice there ;) ), maybe
> > orphan unmaintained players/viewers, or check if they are
> > maintained and hand them to a specific maintainer, and then see
> > about merging or splitting all those projects *after* gaining
> > experience and knowledge about the peculiarities of some of those
> > packages ?
> >
>
> Probably best to leave the details up to those doing the work, but I
> would suggest this as a guideline:
>
> Keep the scope reasonable.  If you expand the scope to a point where
> 90% of the project members don't care about 50% of the project scope,
> then you're setting yourself up for a repeat of the past.  You want
> 80% of the project members to be interested in 80% of the packages
> being maintained ideally.  Sure, there will be little niches that a
> subset are more interested in, but you want to keep it focused around
> a core where coordination makes sense.  You can have different roles
> in the project but it should still be one project.

Totally agree here. Back in the days we had split proaudio from sound
for this very reason.

> If most of the project members aren't talking to each other about most
> of the things they're doing in the project, then it isn't really a
> project - it is just a category tag.  The point of a project is to
> coordinate things that actually NEED to be coordinated or at least
> benefit from it in some way.

It is not like a KDE, gnome or gstreamer project that has very tight
coordination needs, so we shouldn't judge those on the same grounds, but
from time to time, when a core library changes its API it needs a
project-wide coordination (plus a few extra revdep here and there that
you get to know over time). That's more how I see coordination there.
It is not as critical nor as frequent as it used to be but still
happens from time to time. Having a codec project goes against that
IMHO, we'd end up with a category tag where there's no relation between
any of the package except they're media libraries.

Alexis.