[FFmpeg-devel] Process for adding new fields to various contexts

[Michael Niedermayer]

On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 12:37:05AM +0100, Ivan Schreter wrote:
> Stefano Sabatini wrote:
> > On date Tuesday 2009-01-27 20:14:00 +0100, Ivan Schreter encoded:
> >   
> >> I intend to fix something in H.264 decoder, but for that I need to 
> >> communicate additional information from parser in libavcodec to 
> >> libavformat (one flag and one count), for instance as variable in 
> >> AVCodecParserContext. I don't want to break binary compatibility, though.
> >>
> >> What is the proper way to do this (in particular and in general)? I 
> >> didn't find any howto (maybe would be interesting to put it online).
> >>     
> >
> > Add the field just at the end of the struct, this way you're not going
> > to change the offsets of all the other fields, this way you save ABI
> > compatibility.
> >   
> Sure. But this is a struct, which is used by both libavformat and 
> libavcodec. I assume that it's allocated inside of libavcodec (didn't 
> check yet). If the versions of libavformat and libavcodec don't match, 
> then it will most probably break.
> 
> I suppose that the version of libavformat must be less than or equal to 
> version of libavcodec in order to guarantee compatibility. In that case 
> (and provided structures are allocated in libavcodec) this should work. 
> Am I correct?

#if no major bump yet
if(avcodec_version() > 123)
#endif
    use some new field



[...]

-- 
Michael     GnuPG fingerprint: 9FF2128B147EF6730BADF133611EC787040B0FAB

There will always be a question for which you do not know the correct awnser.
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