[MPlayer-dev-eng] Cleaning up incoming

[Reimar Döffinger]

On Sun, Dec 20, 2009 at 04:23:44PM +0100, Erik Auerswald wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> a view from the outside:
> 
> On Sun, Dec 20, 2009 at 05:07:02PM +0200, Uoti Urpala wrote:
> > On Sun, 2009-12-20 at 15:11 +0100, Reimar Döffinger wrote:
> > > On Sun, Dec 20, 2009 at 02:38:43PM +0200, Uoti Urpala wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > I'm against that. Making the partition smaller to intentionally cause
> > > > out-of-space problems is just that - intentionally and unnecessarily
> > > > causing problems where none existed before.
> > > 
> > > No, it solves the problems of people leaving (possibly important) samples
> > > in incoming until nobody knows anymore what they were there for and why.
> > 
> > You're claiming it would "solve" the problems, but the only thing it'd
> > directly do is cause _much worse_ problems.
> >
> > Ability to upload new samples is much higher priority than keeping
> > years-old samples, so endangering the former for the sake of the latter
> > is a bad idea.
> 
> IMHO this is correct. While it would be nice to keep a history, it is
> obviously not feasible to keep _every_ sample. Thus removing the oldest
> samples (that obviously were not important enough to sort into a
> permanent directory) from incoming is the simplest solution for the
> space problem.

Unfortunately, lying around wildly in incoming is no good indication of lack
of importance of the sample I fear.
Also I disagree the issue is a "space problem", but more a consideration of
how to make incoming and samples most useful.

> > You're obviously hoping that incoming running out of space would
> > motivate people to sort the samples.
> 
> In my personal experience such attempts always fail. I can only strongly
> discourage you from trying this out.

The question as I see it is simply if we will be deleting old files because
we are running out of space every 4 years, during which time both incoming
_and_ samples will be too full to work well with them, or maybe every 12
months while we might still remember if some of the files we want to delete
should better be moved to samples and where moving things to sample frees
space in incoming, thus removing the bias toward deleting instead of moving
to samples that the current approach has.
Or to put it differently: I try to suggest approaches that would remove biases
that would or do discourage me personally to do more to keep incoming/sample
more tidy. Sure, trying to "force" people is unlikely to work, but putting a few
more boulders in their way sure isn't an advantage!