I am not going to reply to any one post. This thread has gotten quite
long. I have read everything until now though.
These days I am mostly an observer of Haiku (though I hope to change
that soon by working on the code again.) I have been around long
enough to have seen the previous drama with the last person we banned.
This is not something we have done lightly, and I don't think we are
doing it lightly now. This is really, really, really unpleasant for
everyone.
Obviously Haiku is an open source project, and people who contribute
can work on what they want. Most of us want to have some fun. Many
people in other communities complain about Haiku being "a hobby
project", and how that is a bad thing because we won't ever be
finished. They have some point, but I think that hobby aspect, and of
course BeOS nostalgia, is a big part of the "magic" of Haiku.
But with that said, there comes a point where you just have stop
ignoring important things in favor of "fun" things and actually fix
the bugs. It doesn't seem like Dario does that in the Media Kit. I am
sure a lot of his work is good and valuable but sometimes you have to
stop working on things like refactoring or adding features and fix the
bugs impacting the rest of the system. I think the combination of that
with the extreme ownership and combativeness is really what puts this
situation over the top.
I have not followed closely all the changes that have been made to the
Media Kit in the last few years. But it sure seems like a lot of
important bugs have not been fixed. That can't be completely blamed on
Dario, I think many of these are very old bugs, but if you are going
to spend so much time working on that code, you really need to try to
fix some bugs.
To this end I would like to work on the Media Kit, not to add
features, but to fix bugs. There are 10-20 bugs related to memory,
buffers and resources being left after application crashes. Those need
to be fixed. I don't want to have to fight with Dario to make those
bug fixes because he "owns" the Media Kit. No one owns anything in
Haiku. Sure, we have some specialties, and areas of expertise, but the
beauty of Haiku is one code-base where someone can fix a kernel bug
one minute then fix a GUI program the next.
So to sum things up, I am trying to think about this in terms of what
is best for the Haiku project. We need more people working on the
Media Kit, and they should be able to do so without fear. If someone
like Dario is not really making the code better, but making it more
complex, and is also making other developers miserable in the
meantime, I think we can all calculate the cost/benefit on that.
Also for those who don't follow Gerrit, before his access was removed,
Dario pushed 89 (!) commits to revert a bunch of his work on the Media
Kit. Many of the reverted commits were perfectly fine commits, so to
me, it just seems vindictive and petty. Now we have to go through and
ignore all those, or figure out which should really be reverted. I
don't want all that garbage in our commit history. It is publicly
viewable, Barrett17 is Dario's username:
https://review.haiku-os.org/q/status:open
To conclude: I agree with the general thought that we should let this
issue sit for a bit. But given the actions above I don't think Dario
should be able to modify the core Haiku code in the meantime, or
should be able to spam Gerrit. If we decide to "unban" him, it should
be done slowly, with some "probation". We use Git, Dario can freely
work on Haiku code in his branch on GitHub, but we can choose to not
let him directly affect the "main" code for the moment.
Sorry that I am adding another overly long email here. But I want to
express myself all at once.
--
Regards,
Ryan
