[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH] Remove the ffserver program and the ffm muxer/demuxer

Nicolas George george at nsup.org
Mon Nov 28 18:39:40 EET 2016


L'octidi 8 frimaire, an CCXXV, James Almer a écrit :
> I discuss project management. This is a late attempt at overriding a decision
> from parties that didn't participate in the real decision making discussions.

Maybe they did not participate because they were busy working on the
actual code.

> This crap wouldn't fly anywhere else

Untrue.

> That nobody will take the project seriously anymore. That nobody will believe
> in any announcement anymore. That anyone will be 100% sure that with a little
> lobbying and trolling they will be able to get away with absolutely anything,
> including overriding old decisions.

I see. Then what about people who will be disgusted that FFmpeg is a
project where positive development (fixing bugs) is overridden by
negative development (removing things) just because the negative people
are more vocal?

My wet finger, which I consider more accurate than yours, tells me there
are many more.

> Malicious was the attempt at turning efforts of making the program capable
> of living on its own into an argument against the reason why it must go.

How is it malicious?

> You're aware that we could have told Reynaldo that no, we don't want to give
> him time to make it work standalone, and this patch would have been pushed
> a week or two ago, long before you even realized this all was even happening?

And that would have been incredibly rude. I would not have supported
that decision.

> That the decision was made, and there's no going back.

There is a French saying that I already quoted in this discussion: only
imbeciles never change their mind. For all it being a saying, it is
still very true.

Making one's mind involves taking into account the state of affairs at
the time and making a conclusion. If the state of affairs changes, then
the valid conclusion may change too. Someone who keeps the old
conclusion in this case is indeed an imbecile.

Well, for ffserver, the state of affairs just changed. Maybe it was a
consequence of the old decision, so what? The old decision was valid at
the time, given the state of affairs then. But the net result is still:
ffserver is now maintained, it no longer blocks the development of the
rest of the project, therefore the correct decision is no longer to
remove it.

> You could also add
> 
> # November 29th, 2016, From now on, announcements from this project are
> # worth as much as a copy of ET for the Atari.
> #
> # Thanks to the efforts of people that couldn't get over the fact they
> # showed up late and that abused the goodwill of some developers, nothing
> # you read announced here from now on is to be trusted.

You seem to have in your values system the axiom "keeping promises for
the sake of keeping promises", as if there was a superior being
rewarding that kind of consistency. A more correct axiom would be
"keeping promises for the sake of the person to whom the promise was
made".

You can try a poll on the users: "Considering the reasons to remove
ffserver are now void, would you have us keep our promise and remove it
now, or change our mind at the last minute and keep it?"

I have no doubt a huge majority of the users will answer: keep it.

> For things up to debate, sure. This is not the case.

What is this, if not a debate?

> No, those are the only options within the boundaries already established.

Changing the boundaries is always an option.

Regards,

-- 
  Nicolas George
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