[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH 3/6] avutil: delay removal of the PIX_FMT_* flags

[Frank Lömker]

Hello,

On 08/09/2015 06:57 AM, Ronald S. Bultje wrote:
>> Does not LGTM.
>
> Yeah, I'm with this. Andreas, the correct fix is to update applications,
> even if that means vendor-specific patches in Debian. These are
> exceptionally trivial patches that you can generate using fairly trivial
> sed scripting.
>
> The same goes for other easily scriptable changes. These APIs are gone and
> I don't want them back.

Please think about it again. There is lots more software out there
than what is packaged in Debian, and with every API change you break
quite a bit of them. Most of this SW is not a media player, where
FFmpeg is the core component of the system. It's often just a small
nice extra feature where FFmpeg is used, where the developers are
just happy after it works, and don't want to spend continuously
time on it to keep it working.

And that's even the easy part. A lot of people don't update there
distribution every six months, often it's years old. If you try to
support all these distributions you end up with lot's and lot's of
#ifdefery. With FFmpeg and it's continuous API changes that gets
quite fast quite complex and hard. And adding a copy of FFmpeg and
linking statically to every small tool is really not a solution.

Two years is extremely short. If you would keep the deprecated
interfaces at least four years that would be a start. It's of
course up to you, but you make the life of your users extremely
hard with these continuous changes.

Just an example of a frustrated developer about API changes,
here QT from 4 to 5 (and Qt is better with API stability,
Qt 4.0 was released 28 June 2005, and the first incompatible
version 5.0 19 December 2012):

    http://www.valdyas.org/fading/index.cgi/2015/04/06

Thanks,

-- 
Frank Lömker