[Gnash-dev] What's in a Dictator?

[olafBuddenhagen]

Hi,

On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 12:56:55PM -0600, Rob Savoye wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 01:24:03PM +0100, address@hidden
> wrote:

> Obviously not an embedded developer. :-) FLTK2 was for small embedded
> platforms to replace SDL. QT is much larger, and not always
> appropriate.

Considering the size of Gnash itself, I have a hard time believing that
the toolkit really makes much of a difference...

I also wonder whether SDL+custom widgets really saves much compared to a
full-blown toolkit.

> > Most projects suffer from nobody *wanting* to do refactoring. Here
> > we have people who volunteer for this -- and you try to discourage
> > them?
> 
> We have the problem of doing more refactoring than moving Gnash
> forward. While I do agree refactoring is a good thing much of the
> time, so is not letting Gnash stagnate.

I don't see a problem there. These things are orthogonal. Doing less
refactoring doesn't mean Gnash will magically begin to move forward...

> As the Gnash maintainer my job is to attempt to coordinate things.

Only as far as necessary to prevent inconsistent features or crappy code
entering the main tree.

> Telling any Gnash dev to do anything usually gets me called a dictator
> though...

As maintainer, you are by definition the dictator as regards to the
official code base. It's up to you to reject changes you consider
harmful. (But it's up to the others to fork or abandon the project if
they think your decisions lack justification...)

> I'm not telling anyone to do or not do anything, but I am making a
> strong suggestion. A true dictator *would* tell people what to do with
> no discussion allowed. Instead I do let developers mostly do what they
> want, which is partially why Gnash has stagnated.

It's not like you have any choice there... :-)

While you can certainly deny people from checking in certain changes,
you can not make them work on other things instead. That's just not in
your power.

> If people aren't interested in moving Gnash forward, they should find
> another project.. Instead some people would rather endless refactor
> the same code till it achieves some preverse type of "perfection". As
> I said, if one can't handle large code bases, they need a new career,
> like flipping burgers... 

Insulting fellow developers for no reason is not a way to get the
project moving forward...

Sometimes I get the impression that you'd prefer to work on Gnash alone.
If so, it would save everyone a lot of pain if you just stated so
directly.

> If we don't start on AVM2 support soon, we might as well give up. Less
> and less sites work with Gnash everyday...

For my part, I totally agree. If I had the required knowledge, AVM2
support would certainly be the thing I'd work on before anything else.

-antrik-