[FFmpeg-devel] Re: [RFC] Funded Task Ideas

[Nicolas George via ffmpeg-devel <ffmpeg-devel@ffmpeg.org>]

Niklas Haas via ffmpeg-devel (HE12025-11-03):
> 4. Developers should announce when they begin working on a bounty, and then
>    nobody else should be able to claim it until a reasonable amount of
>    time has passed. (Perhaps 12 weeks)

That seems rather reasonable, and in line with my position that people
being paid to work on FFmpeg, i.e. who have incentives not completely
aligned, should disclose it. You could add the requirement of a periodic
status update.

I think we should add:

5. When a bounty involves design decisions, these decisions must be
   discussed on the mailing list before investing time and effort in
   implementation.

I do not want to repeat the fiasco of the channel layout API where the
proposed API was developed entirely in private and ended up covering
about a third of the uses cases, and when it was published it was a >100
patch series and too late to salvage it more than partially.

For this to work, we need a way to commit ourselves to the outcome of
the discussion. In particular the outcome of the first discussion “do we
want that feature or not?”.

If we discuss the design in July and come to as consensus, we do not
want somebody who neglected the discussion at the time to be able to
block the code in October because they do not like the design. They can
object on technical matters, but as long as the code matches the design,
you do not like the design, too bad, the time to say it was three months
ago.

For the code, committing ourselves to the decision means pushing the
patches. But for the design, we do not have such a mechanism, and that
is an issue.

Regards,

-- 
  Nicolas George
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