On date Friday 2015-07-31 15:53:04 +0200, Michael Niedermayer wrote: > Hi all > > Ive been in FFmepg since 14 years and been the leader since 11 years > and i feel that iam not the best person for the leader position. > I had hoped for a long time that the fork situation would resolve and > both sides somehow merging back into one team. All the Libav developers > joining FFmpeg again. But even now as the last distributions are > preparing to remove Libav, still theres no hint of that happening. > Maybe even the opposite. > > The community is split and its very difficult to be the leader when > one is on one side of this split and the other tries everything to > push me out > > I hope my resignation will make it easier for the teams to find back > together and avoid a more complete split which would otherwise be > the result sooner or later as the trees diverge and merging all > improvments becomes too difficult for me to do. > > also before my resignation, i offer all maintainers who dont yet have, > direct write access as i likely will not comb through the ML anymore > or not as frequently to apply patches, please send me your public SSH > key if you are de facto maintaining or working on some part of FFmpeg > or are listed in MAINTAINERs. > > If people want to continue merges from libav, someone else will have > to do these. Indeed i fully admit the work and pressure caused by > the merges is a main reason for my resignation. > > FFmpeg belongs to the FFmpeg developers and the FFmpeg community! > > will i ever return ? ... i might ..., if theres a nice and friendly > environment, no hostile forks or at least none i have to interact with. > But i will certainly not return as leader, this is not really a role > i ever truly liked, more one i ended up with. > Especially as somehow "leader" is being interpreted by everyone as > "the guy who does all work noone else does, and takes all > responsibility noone else wants to take"
I want to thank you for all the impressive work you've done so far, if you decided this abruptly it's probably time for you to release the burden and enjoy some relax and pursue other objectives and interests in your life. I only hoped that you would have done this in a more progressive way, leaving involved people to realize what to do next after your resignation. Indeed you've been by far the most important person in the project for several years, and now that you resign the project and will probably change deeply, for better or for worse. On the other hand I understand that if you decided to resign this way, you have your good reasons, and I accept this, and this abruptness will probably solicit more energic action from all the involved contributors. Indeed, your major involvement in so many areas of the project was one of its current main vulnerabilities, since it depended on a single person. Now I'm curious to see how the community around the project will cope with it and if the project will be able to recover. About the "the guy who does all work noone else does, and takes all responsibility noone else wants to take" I can understand this very well, and I understand how taking this role of leadership, especially in a voluntary based project, and having to cope with all the critics which comes from that, can be exhausting and overwhelming, and I was concerned more than one time about how you was personally able to cope with that. Dealing with such a role is not easy, and you deserve all the respect for being able to keep the burden for so much time. I understand that taking all these responsabilities can be an attractor for scorn and contempt, since people tend to take for granted all the duties, and complain about all the mistakes and disagreements, so I want to express here again my personal gratitude for your contribution. You did a lot for the multimedia community and for the free software community in general, and your personal contribution is impressive. I always found your attitude very helpful, even in spite of some sarcastic comments that you was used to make some years ago, and your honesty and frankness refreshing, and they contributed to make of FFmpeg the very successfull and cornerstone project it actually is, despite the many fights and flames it had to tackle. My wish is that now you'll be able now to spend more time for your own health and wellness. And of course I'd like you to be around the project, especially during this transitioning period. Losing your contribution and intimate knowledge of the code as well as of the theory and technology, as well as your personality, would be a tremendous loss. [...] > If you now think "ohh god what should i do, michael resigned" > very simple, FFmpeg is yours, that is everyones. try your best to > make FFmpeg be the best. > Post patches, review patches, apply patches, discuss code and design. > Report bugs, bisect, debug and fix bugs, add features, help users. > Do friendly merges, and if you like do hostile merges. > Its all up to you now! I have no good advice to give here, I realize it will be probably a mess in the first period, or it may even work flawlessly since people in their "maintainance" area had always much freedom and so don't rely and depend so much on you. It's possible also that some form of leadership will arise. I think there are very skilled developers which may cover some of the areas you handled. The most critical point is probably related to the merges from Libav, and the best solution would be *not* to have them at all, merging back the two projects again. I won't insist on this point since there is already a dedicated thread. [...] > PS3: I would suggest a new "leader" if there was a clear pick, a year > or 2 ago i would have suggested stefano or clement but they are > not so active currently. Maybe a good candidate will appear in > the future or stefano & ubitux will become more active again > in which case i would suggest one of them as leader if the > community wants to have a leader and they agree. I appreciate your trust, but I don't think I'm a feasible candidate as general maintainer. Even if I would want that, and I probably don't since my general interest is slowly slipping adrift away from programming, I could never find the time, and I don't feel like I have a suffcient level of competence or involvement in many areas of FFmpeg. > > Thanks to everyone, for everything they did and will do in the future > for FFmpeg and the community ! So long, and thanks for all the fish. I hope you will stay around anyway as contributor and generic multimedia "guru". _______________________________________________ ffmpeg-devel mailing list ffmpeg-devel@ffmpeg.org http://ffmpeg.org/mailman/listinfo/ffmpeg-devel
