[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH][7/8] Add VA API accelerated H.264 decoding (take 4)

[Reimar Döffinger]

On Mon, Feb 09, 2009 at 04:59:13PM +0100, Gwenole Beauchesne wrote:
> Besides, experience shows that factorization 
> doesn't work, or I missed factorization work for X11, Xv, XvMC VO et al. 
> in MPlayer for example.

If you have not noticed any you indeed missed it. There is no question
it still has a long way to go though.

> There seems to always be subtle differences that 
> would tend to be fixed with an over-engineered abstraction.

In case of your examples, I'd guess about 80% of those differences are
1) bugs that were only fixed in one place
2) different opinions of what the "right" way is, helpfully confusing
any users since switching the vo has lots of side-effects
3) someone did all kinds of cosmetic changes

> At the very least, you should have commented on the real implementation 
> earlier/beforehand, not many weeks after commenting on pure *cosmetics*. 
> That's a terrible waste of time, and totally suboptimal process. IOW, 
> cosmetics are the last things to care about in a process, especially if 
> those are things that could be done through an automated tool.

Have you ever done patch reviews? You don't just decide "oh, I'll now
list all architectural issues" or "I'll list all cosmetic issues".
Cosmetic issues are trivial to find, whereas architectural issues need a
good understanding of the code, which simply requires time and can be
hindered (sometimes severely) by the cosmetic issues.
I think we are willing to learn to do better, if there is someone who
can teach us how, but I think we so far simply go with what we learned
by ourselves and fits our style.

Greetings,
Reimar D?ffinger