[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH] Dynamic plugins loading

[Luca Barbato]

On 11/01/2010 01:52 AM, Ronald S. Bultje wrote:
> 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

You can already if you want in the application

> - security becomes worthless, any plugin can exploit a system

So the application

> - stability becomes a nightmare as soon as you start thinking about
> possibly updating ABI/API

Any application have to care about it

> - 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

No different than features implemented in the main application IMHO

> - 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

Not that companies aren't already doing that using wrapper/abstraction
libraries

> 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?

Right.

In short: the trick is nice to extend ffmpeg and ffplay, but doesn't add
or subtract much beside making harder to track bugs to disingenuous
people not updating the plugins while updating ffmpeg.

I think we could check the concept if there is a compelling use case or
enough users want the feature.

lu

-- 

Luca Barbato
Gentoo/linux
http://dev.gentoo.org/~lu_zero