[FFmpeg-devel] [VOTE] 1st/3rd person doxy

[Michael Niedermayer]

On Thu, Jul 08, 2010 at 08:49:02PM -0700, Mike Melanson wrote:
> On 07/08/2010 06:43 PM, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
>> 5. add a 1st person perogative rule to policy
>
> Spelled "prerogative", believe it or not.
>
>> also there are 2 contradicting viewpoints, first being that it should be
>> decided by our best english speakers and the second is that everyone
>> has to work with the documentation and thus should decide.
>> also theres the question if we need/want another rule or not
>
> What's wrong with the de facto policy of everyone adds documentation as 
> best they can and the native speakers clean it up after the fact?

i have no problem with language cleanups by natives.
What the problem is, is that not every change done to english language
is a english language cleanup.


and for things that arent language cleanups other de facto nettiquette
exist, for example:

when one knows that other developers are against a change then one should
not just commit without prior discussion and patch. Thats pretty much 
a requirement to avoid long flamewars. And pretty much should be common
sense, part of de facto standard politeness and nettiquette.
And in extension to this if one changes peoples code below their fingers
in ways they do not want then these developers leave and develop where
the troubblemaker has no write access. We need all developers and we
dont want people leaving due to some bikeshed thus maintainer borders
have to be respected in line with discussion and wishes of people involved
Of course as long as a maintainer is perfectly fine with someone else
making some kind of change to his code theres nothing wrong at all if
others do such changes to his code.

Noone is going to say anything against a typo fix or an improvment of
how something is expressed. And i dont remember anyone ever saying anything
against such changes.
But for example the removial of rants from source code documentation
is not a language cleanup nor something one can just commit without asking.
Such commits are nothing but provocative.
Nor is when the agreed form of doxygen comments is by past discussion
supposed to be consistent with the official doxygen/javadoc style.
A change from this to another style any less provocative.
Such changes can be done but they need a bit more politeness and nettiquette
a patch and a nice and friendly email on the developer list.

If people skip that they provocate others (and often knowingly and intended
for their political agenda but lets not drift off topic)
and when one is provocated, one complains, asks for reverts and a long
flamewar starts that goes far beyond the 1 or 2 mails a polite question
would have needed. Besides that a polite question and patch can in
many cases lead to improvments to the change by considering suggestions
of others

And that all is of course seperate from plain wrong changes, such are
unacceptable, and if done by mistake (which happens) then they have to
be reverted, theres no way around this.

[...]

-- 
Michael     GnuPG fingerprint: 9FF2128B147EF6730BADF133611EC787040B0FAB

Opposition brings concord. Out of discord comes the fairest harmony.
-- Heraclitus
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