[Ffmpeg-devel] BeOS support to be discontinued Feb 1 2007

[Måns Rullgård]

"Cian Duffy" <myob87 at gmail.com> writes:

> On 12/12/06, M?ns Rullg?rd <mru at inprovide.com> wrote:
>>
>> Parts of libavformat are currently riddled with special cases for
>> BeOS.  This special casing is making everyday code maintenance
>> increasingly difficult, and flies in the face of our commitment to
>> write clean, portable code.
>>
>> We have repeatedly asked the BeOS users (Francois et al) to clean up
>> the mess, only to be met with silence.
>
> Erm... I seem to remember I'm the only person who's pushed for BeOS
> support recently, I don't remember being asked? If you could provide
> a clearer description of what the "mess" is, I'd be more than
> willing to take a look in to it, but not having heard anything on
> here or when I've been on IRC, I haven't got a clue.

Hehe... I and Diego figured something like this would get your
attention.  We've discussed this very course of action on IRC, but
maybe you weren't around just then.

>> In light of the above, we regrettably have only one remaining option:
>> dropping BeOS support.
>>
>> If the BeOS users wish to see continued support for their OS of
>> choice, they have until February 1 2007 to come up with a clean
>> solution for whatever the issues may be.  If by that time we have seen
>> some serious efforts to set things straight, we will of course extend
>> the deadline within reasonable bounds.
>
> Again, if the "issues" were made clear...

Do a grep for BEOS in the FFmpeg source.  There's a lot of
BeOS-related #ifdeffery in libavformat.

>> My sincere hope is that this mail will finally awaken someone who is
>> both willing and capable to sort this out.  Dropping support for a
>> platform, no matter how obscure, is never a fun thing to do.
>>
>> Before the flaming starts, I would like to point to the situation on
>> win32.  A few months ago we were receiving reports on a daily basis
>> regarding compilation and runtime issues with both cygwin and mingw.
>> Many proposals were made, most of them rejected for much the same
>> reasons we wish to clean up the BeOS support.  Nevertheless, through
>> the efforts of a few dedicated users, we managed to achieve full
>> functionality on win32 without resorting to ugly hacks.
>
> Full functionality on BeOS R5 isn't possible without "ugly hacks",
> however with networking disabled, it should be.

Would it be possible to contain those hacks in single C source or
header file?

Also, could you please outline the major variants of BeOS around, what
problems they might have with FFmpeg code, and if there's any good
reason for people to still be using old troublesome versions?

-- 
M?ns Rullg?rd
mru at inprovide.com