[FFmpeg-devel] Areas needing work

Michael Niedermayer michaelni at gmx.at
Mon Apr 6 05:43:29 CEST 2015


Hi all

There are various areas in the project that are not maintained as well as they
should be, heres a certainly not comlpete list, dont hesitate to reply and add to it.
If someone wants to pick something up and contribute that is VERY welcome

* Post merge review&cleanup, changes merged from libav would benefit from
  people reviewing and MUCH MUCH more importantly also people actually caring
  about and taking responsibility not just dumping comments with the idea
  "someone" will fix it.
  Ideally each area would have a maintainer who takes care of it and
  keeps it in good nick.


* fate clients
  we lack a armcc test, a real android test
  someone should take over haiku and sunos/solaris fate clients, my haiku VM just
  keeps crashing


* our fate server lacks the ability to display a user specified release
  this makes the output look quite unwieldy
  Timothy was working on a rewrite


* Paid maintainers
  a big problem is that we have areas in the codebase that have no maintainr or
  rather noone with sufficient time+will+abilty.
  It would help tremendiusly if maintainers could work full
  time on maintaining code instead of just a few hours in their free
  time


* ffserver lacks a regression test
  code that is not tested will accumulate bugs. period
  there are people who use ffserver, they clearly like the lack of regression
  tests it seems as noone finds the need to look into changing that.


* more people should help on https://trac.ffmpeg.org, like check that tickets
  contain all information needed to reproduce and ask the reporter to provide
  missing information, check if things are regressions, if they can be reproduced,
  bisect regressions or ask the reporter to bisect and help him if needed
  close tickets where there is not enough information to reproduce and the
  reporter doesnt react for months. ATM carl does all that and more but
  iam sure he wouldnt mind if more people would help him


* Stipends and Sponsorship programs
  We do not have enough funds for basic things, for example OPW/Outreachy is
  twice a year and to participate we have to pay at least one stipend
  (about 6.5k USD). We participated in december 2014 and it allowed us to convert
  all remaining libmpcodecs filters to the native system. resulted in multiple
  new video filters and several block ciphers which are faster then all other
  tested implementations. For may 2015 we only way after the last minute managed
  to secure some funding so we are short of applicants now as for a long
  time ffmpeg was not listed as a participating org.


* Decentralize
  Too many things are done and admined by me, iam doing security updates to the
  servers, doing the git merges, maintaining all releases, maintaining half the
  fate clients, submitting data to coverity and doing all the crap that noone
  else wants to do.
  Does the community care so little that they want me to be a single point of
  failure?
  We need people to take some of this over at least on the basis of a backup
  in case iam unavailable for whatever reason, and i think it should ideally
  be people who do not yet have their daily work shedule overflowing with ffmpeg
  work but better new volunteers.


* Conferences / exhibitions, public stuff
  Theres a conference, linuxtag, fosdem, whatever, wherever in your local area
  and you think FFmpeg should be represented there ?
  Simple, go there and represent FFmpeg! unless you are too shy ... of course.
  FFmpeg is a large community of users and developers, the developers who
  managed the last stands/booths arent special, every FFmpeg developer and even
  Users who know ffmpeg a bit better who like can do this too.
  Also please add all conferences / exhibitions to
  https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Conferences


You dont have time to help with any above or you prefer pretending that
you dont, well, maybe you know someone else who could help with something,
dont hesitate to ask them / forward this!

please make sure to keep ffmpeg-devel in CC if you reply from ffmpeg-user

-- 
Michael     GnuPG fingerprint: 9FF2128B147EF6730BADF133611EC787040B0FAB

I know you won't believe me, but the highest form of Human Excellence is
to question oneself and others. -- Socrates
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