[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH] Dynamic plugins loading

[Michael Niedermayer]

On Sun, Oct 31, 2010 at 08:52:52PM -0400, Ronald S. Bultje wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Sun, Oct 31, 2010 at 9:42 AM, Nicolas George
> <nicolas.george at normalesup.org> wrote:
> > There is probably much to discuss, but at the very least, it works to simply
> > add support for a new format in lavf by just dropping a file in a directory.
> > Codecs and filters should work just the same.
> 
> Let's just go over the big phat elephant in the room. Is this an advantage?

i was starting to be scared and surprised that noone was bringing the "why"
up already.


> 
> I used to think this kind of stuff was good. But is there really an
> advantage to all this? I can think of disadvantages:
> - no strong license enforcement because you can separate shipping of
> software pieces that have strictly incompatible licenses
> - security becomes worthless, any plugin can exploit a system
> - stability becomes a nightmare as soon as you start thinking about
> possibly updating ABI/API
> - dynamic plugins won't share code with the main source tree, which
> means that the best point of FFmpeg - fast and lean - no longer
> applies
> - companies can suddenly get away with releasing a binary plus FFmpeg
> wrapper code. This is _bad_. We don't want to promote this kind of
> silliness in any way
> 
> If people want a massive, slow, insecure licensing headache that has
> something to do with multimedia, they can install one of the many
> "multimedia frameworks" that were created to """solve""" this problem.
> Right?

It also reminds me of firefox, huge numbers of plugins, the basic browser
lacks huge amounts of basic functionality (resuming downloads, enabling
cookies & scripts per site & blocking well known addvertisement/spy sites)
what should be is firefox should include all that is usefull and that should
be properly checked for being securely implemented.

I agree with ronald that a plugin architecture wont do us nor our users any
good.


[...]
-- 
Michael     GnuPG fingerprint: 9FF2128B147EF6730BADF133611EC787040B0FAB

Many things microsoft did are stupid, but not doing something just because
microsoft did it is even more stupid. If everything ms did were stupid they
would be bankrupt already.
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