Hi all,
Not replying to anyone in particular, but wanted to throw in another
long-term observer yet non-committer perspective here.
It's clear trust had broken down between Dario and many other
individual project members (and the Inc), and that was apparent from
interactions in the public channels which were not healthy for the
project or the individuals involved (both Dario and others have spoken
about the cost to their mental health).
Having commit access in the project is the ultimate expression of
being part of the team, and I came to the view a few months ago that
Dario's behaviour towards others in the team and engagement with the
processes (code review etc) was not compatible with his remaining a
member of that group. That remains my view now. However the
implementation of the "ban" was too hasty. It was my hope that in fact
a mutual recognition on both sides that it was a relationship that
wasn't working would have been possible.
Dario is clearly a skilled developer with a deep interest in improving
media suppprt on Haiku, and the project could certainly benefit from
his contributions, even if his way of working and communicating is not
compatible with the expectations of those with commit access.
However in a distributed world there are other ways of working.
Line-by-line per-commit code review is also not necessarily
appropriate for the sort of large refactor that Dario is interested in
- it's not possible to perfectly design something first time before
implementing it, some aspects take a few iterations to get right.
IMHO the best process would be for Dario to work on it independently
and then submit a "complete" media2 pull request where a higher level
discussion could take place about whether overall this was a change
the project would be keen to accept. That work could happen in a
public fork somewhere on github where interested people could follow
along, but where there would be no process questions or tension. For
example Dario could focus on the interesting parts during development,
and not have to worry about minor code style issues (at least until
preparing a pull request back into Haiku).
Probably wishful thinking at this stage given the bad feeling on both
sides but I thought it worth suggesting as a potential model allowing
Dario to continue persuing his interests (and Haiku benefiting from
the work) without undue levels of conflict in the process.
We're all here for "fun" after all... :)
Simon
