[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH 1/2] avcodec/s302m: enable non-PCM decoding

[Anton Khirnov]

Quoting Michael Niedermayer (2024-02-18 23:34:39)
> More formally, you could define a "party to a disagreement" as
> all minimal sets of people whos non existence would resolve the disagreement

That is a useless definition in practice, because it is unknowable. It
is very common that developers to not bother voicing their opinion when
someone else is doing that already. E.g. in this very case Andreas
prompted me to reply to the patch, presumably because he also does not
want it to go in in its current form.

And yet if he, or someone else, had argued forcefully against the patch,
I probably would not have - not out of some political calculations, but
simply because it saves me time. Then my TC vote would not be questioned
and we would not be having this discussion at all. It seems absurd to me
that TC members should be prevented from voting based on such random
factors.

> > > But I think it is reasonable that parties of a disagreement cannot be
> > > the judge of the disagreement.
> > 
> > Why not? This is one of those truthy-sounding statements that does not
> > actually hold up to scrutiny.
> 
> * A disagreement implies that there are 2 parties
> * And we assume here that what one party wants is better for FFmpeg than what the other wants.
> * The TC needs to find out which partys choice is better or suggest a 3rd choice.
> * If one but not the other party is a member of the TC then this decission becomes biased if that member votes

This example is flawed in at least two following ways:

First, you keep comparing TC members to judges in a legal system. As I
said above - in a paragraph you ignored - I do not think that is a
meaningful comparison. We have no law, TC members are not judges and
decide based on their experience and opinions.

> Imagine a judge kills someone and judges himself innocent afterwards in a panel of 5 judges

Second, in this example the judge in question has two roles in the
situation: that of a criminal who wants to avoid being found guilty and that
of a judge who is supposed to find criminals guilty. The interests of
these roles are in conflict, hence we have a conflict of interest.

That does not translate to the situation we are actually dealing with.
My interests in my role as a patch reviewer and as a TC member are
exactly the same. There is thus no conflict of interest.

There might have been conflict of interest if e.g. I was being paid for
ensuring the code works a certain specfic way, but I am not.

I am explaining all this in such detail because people in this thread
keep using this term apparently without realizing that in order to have
a conflict of interest there must in fact be multiple interests that are
in conflict, not just a person having multiple roles at once.

> Your interpretation suggests that the TC members are "above" everyone and should
> prevail in arguments they have with others.

I have no idea how you arrived at that conclusion, it does not follow
from anything I wrote.

-- 
Anton Khirnov