[FFmpeg-devel] To be or not to be working with libav (was: [PATCHv3] On2 VP7 decoder)

[Clément Bœsch]

On Sun, Apr 06, 2014 at 08:41:03PM +0200, Vittorio Giovara wrote:
> On Sunday, April 6, 2014, Nicolas George <george at nsup.org> wrote:
> 
> > Le septidi 17 germinal, an CCXXII, Vittorio Giovara a écrit :
> > > The easiest solution would be to stop the daily merge and let the two
> > > projects live on their own
> >
> > You keep suggesting that: what good do you think that would achieve?
> 
> 
> Uhm, competition?
> Foss projects foster on innovative ways of tackling problems, and that
> pushes developers to improve their code. When a project keeps pulling
> features from another and adding on top of it, it stifles competition and
> demotivates developers, with the end result that *less* open source code is
> written.
> 
> Also Libav code is so ill received most of the times that I seriously can't
> figure out why this is still happening.

You should stop burying your head in the sand, several people told you
already all the reasons. Let me restate that yet another time in a clear
and simple way:

 - it simplifies future merge in case Libav fixes or introduce something

 - it keeps track of every single change Libav introduced these last
   years, which allows several sub points:

   * users don't have to wonder whether this change is in or not: it's
     likely in (likely because sometimes the change itself is present for
     various reasons - look at the merge commits themselves).

   * authorship and diff are kept verbatim: this means that typically if
     the two projects decide to merge again (or if Libav just dies)
     absolutely no work is lost in the process. It would just like nothing
     had happened. I personally believe this is the most important point.

   * and of course, as you guessed, it's a political choice so we can say
     that FFmpeg is a superset of Libav.

> The two projects have completely
> separate design approach and dev model so it's really difficult to
> understand, in my opinion
> 

Design approach and dev model is not different. I'm sorry but Shuffling
spaces and files, and NIH syndrom are not a "design approach". If we can't
redesign existing APIs, it's because of our compatibility curse (which we
are responsible of yes) which we believe is more important for users.

About the dev model, I'm pretty sure you are referring to the review
process. In my opinion the review process in Libav is a joke, and AFAICT
it works way better in FFmpeg. A lot of things wouldn't have been possible
in Libav in the past years because of this, and so I'm verry happy we are
not following that model.

Now, I know you are here motivated by some hope that the merge will stop
because it annoys you, but instead of wasting our time, I would encourage
you to continue wasting yours by cherry-picking random commits from FFmpeg
to Libav. You have about 3 years of development to keep up with. Good
luck.

[...]

-- 
Clément B.
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