[FFmpeg-devel] [VOTE] Equality and leader team

[Guennadi Liakhovetski]

On Sat, 5 Feb 2011, Felipe Contreras wrote:

> On Sat, Feb 5, 2011 at 6:31 PM, Michael Niedermayer <michaelni at gmx.at> wrote:
> > On Sat, Feb 05, 2011 at 05:47:18PM +0200, Felipe Contreras wrote:
> >> On Sat, Feb 5, 2011 at 1:31 PM, Michael Niedermayer <michaelni at gmx.at> wrote:
> >> > It was said the new system is similar to the linux kernel, but really it has
> >> > nothing to do with it. Linus and Andrew have not been locked out of the
> >> > process by 7 of their friends and asked to send patches.
> >>
> >> This shows you have absolutely no idea how linux development works.
> >
> >> Andrew Morton sends all his patches:
> >> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.mm/57767
> >>
> >> In fact, he has to, because nor he, nor anybody else has commit access
> >> to Linus's tree, but Linus. That's the whole point of a *distributed*
> >> DSCM; every person has his own repo. But according to your definition,
> >> Linus has evilly locked out all kernel developers and maintainers.
> >
> > nope, linus is the most qualified and it makes alot of sense that he is the
> > gatekeeper, what we have here is different, the 7 barely know maybe 1/3 of
> > the code. Iam alone the author of 1/3 and know alot more.
> 
> Linus most certainly has not written 1/3 of the kernel, most likely
> not even 1/100. Pretty much all he does is merge branches. Moreover,
> he is not looking into each single commit, he has a few people he
> trusts, and as long as the patches come with the ack of those pople,
> he merges. Those lieutenants in turn don't look into every patch, they
> have people they trust, and as long as the patches have their ack,
> they accept them. And so on.
> 
> FFmpeg doesn't need a Linus that would be merging 130 subtrees and
> making sure nothing explodes, a bot can do that.

I think it would be a good commit strategy to have a _release manager_, 
who would manage the official "release" ffmpeg tree, into which (s)he 
would merge all other personal trees and tag releases, used for any 
official packages. Something like the bot proposed above, but human, don't 
think you can trust this to a bot.

Thanks
Guennadi
---
Guennadi Liakhovetski, Ph.D.
Freelance Open-Source Software Developer
http://www.open-technology.de/