[Ffmpeg-devel] [RFC] ffmpeg-windows mailinglist?

[Diego Biurrun]

On Tue, Aug 01, 2006 at 09:09:21PM -0400, Augie Fackler wrote:
> 
> On Aug 1, 2006, at 5:34 PM, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> 
> >On Tue, Aug 01, 2006 at 10:10:50PM +0200, Diego Biurrun wrote:
> >>On Tue, Aug 01, 2006 at 02:16:31PM -0400, Augie Fackler wrote:
> >>>
> >>>On Aug 1, 2006, at 11:24 AM, Diego Biurrun wrote:
> >>><snip>
> >>>FWIW, I have seen several patches of interest to me go completely
> >>>ignored on this list.
> >>
> >>Examples?
> >
> >yeah iam curious too ...
> 
> The only examples I can find with thread view on the archives being  
> such a nightmare were two that I had special interest in, wherein a  
> couple of macosx-related configure changes were ignored until they  
> were posted a second time (after waiting 3  days for a response in  
> both cases).

Do I understand right that you are complaining that some patch sat in
the queue without getting a response for 3 days ?!?

May I remind you that reviewing is unpaid, unceremonious and - as this
mail exchange proves - extremely underappreciated work.  Look at how few
people do it.  I'd say the ratio of committers to reviewers is about 10
to 1.

The reviewing situation in FFmpeg is excellent IMNSHO.  Just compare it
with other projects of similar size.  MPlayer gets tons of patches and
unfortunately many end up ignored because the reviewers are swamped and
most developers are lazy about reviewing.

I believe you have things backwards.  Reviewers should not go out of
their way to accomodate patch senders, it should be the other way
around.  Reviewer time is just that much more valuable...

> >>The mactel situation is unfortunate because it may not be possible to
> >>support the currently available toolchain without intrusive hacks  
> >>that
> >>are unlikely to be accepted.  Also some requests for changes in those
> >>patches were never fulfilled, I reviewed some of the build system
> >>myself...
> >
> >yes, macintel and windows patch authors have the strong tendency to  
> >ignore
> >our comments to their patches, and then they come back and whine  
> >that we
> >didnt apply their patch, of course we cant as they ignore our comments
> >the dr-ffmpeg patches are another such example
> 
> Usually the comments boil down to "this is ugly" or something similar  
> with no feedback on what could make the patch "pretty" enough to be  
> accepted. As an example, taken from <http://svn.cod3r.com/perian/ 
> trunk/ffmpeg-svn-mactel.patch>:
> -        ".balign 16                     \n\t"
> +        BALIGN_16
> and
> +#if defined(__APPLE__)
> +#  define BALIGN_8  ".align 3 \n\t"
> +#  define BALIGN_16 ".align 4 \n\t"
> +#else
> +#  define BALIGN_8  ".balign 8 \n\t"
> +#  define BALIGN_16 ".balign 16 \n\t"
> +#endif
> 
> Is this really so ugly as to be a scar upon the codebase? If not,  
> then what in the linked patch is truly so objectionable?

I think Rich did a good job of explaining this.

It's a great pity IMO that most people seem to be content with coming up
with a hack that makes their machines work but seem unwilling to work on
a more general solution ...

Diego