[FFmpeg-devel] [REQUEST] Remove me from GA

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Le keskiviikkona 20. marraskuuta 2024, 19.16.50 EET Michael Niedermayer a 
écrit :
> The CC has been involved in both Paul leaving

You're shooting the messenger. As CC members rightfully pointed out 
previously, the CC does not even have the power to ban a developer 
permanently.

Paul decided to leave because he was fed up with the project's processes. And 
by that I mean obvious basic things like code review and testing. That works 
if you are alone in the project, or if people are paid to do the boring stuff 
and clean up after you. But that does not work in an open-source community.

To make matters worse, his negative attitude or trolling on the mailing list 
and IRC channels were very demotivating to many people (including me).

You actually expressed not so long ago the opinion that somebody should be 
paid to import his Librempeg work into FFmpeg. And that is saying the same 
thing, just from a different angle.

You *cannot* have everyone happy to continue to contribute to FFmpeg, no 
matter how badly you think you want it. There is no point continuing this 
argument. By officially not picking a side, you just piss all sides of every 
arguments off, and ultimately we end up with the worst possible outcome: 
demotivated developers and people leaving left and right.

> as well as Nicolas largely stoping contributing.

Of the 2 years and then some that I have been actively following the mailing 
list, Nicolas contributions have mostly consisted of arrogant and/or 
adversarial messages, sometimes even conspiratorial. Then he posts the 
occasional technically valid but helpless and condescending code review 
comments, such as this:
https://ffmpeg.org/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2024-November/335721.html

I can believe that he has been productive and a net positive to the project at 
some point in time, but that does not reflect on his behaviour while I have 
been here. Besides, he made no secret that he wants to turn the FFmpeg 
(allegedly back) into some experimental research project and not care about 
user and downstream needs. That is counter to what the large majority of 
people here want and what FFmpeg is officially striving for:
"a complete, cross-platform solution to record, convert and stream audio and 
video" (source: FFmpeg.org main page).

I am pretty sure that he is the person who has most vocally and frequently 
called for a fork - with the caveat that FFmpeg.org would become the fun 
research project while the boring popular software maintenance would have to 
change name.

> Thats a significant loss to the project

If you see it that way, you have the moral right to heed the calls that 
Nicolas made. But you seem to be the only person with delusions that both his 
"fun" designs and the "boring" designs can be accomodated together in a single 
mailing list and VCS repository.

In my personal opinion, it is precisely your refusal to accept the reality 
that you can't accomodate everybody and act accordingly and decisively, that 
is dragging the project down by generating all those arguments and wasting 
people's time and motivation.

And no, that sentence is not slander even if it is not nice. (And yes, there 
is admittedly also a proxy war for the FFlabs boardroom battle.)

> While at the same time the CC did not take effective action against
> multiple other people

> Just this whole thread should not exist in this form if the CC was working

You can't have it both ways. The CC cannot be taking too strong actions and 
too weak actions at the same time.

-- 
レミ・デニ-クールモン
http://www.remlab.net/