[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH] Remove the ffserver program and the ffm muxer/demuxer

wm4 nfxjfg at googlemail.com
Fri Nov 25 11:36:40 EET 2016


On Thu, 24 Nov 2016 21:40:14 -0300
James Almer <jamrial at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 11/24/2016 8:48 PM, Andreas Cadhalpun wrote:
> > On 24.11.2016 10:53, Josh de Kock wrote:  
> >> There's no benefit in waiting for this to occur before ffserver is
> >> removed as it will always be in git history. Removing ffserver from
> >> master may even speed up the "resurrection of ffserver". I think this
> >> shouldn't be delayed any further.  
> > 
> > Similarly there is no benefit in removing ffserver before the next major
> > bump, because the libraries have to stay backwards compatible until then,
> > anyway.
> > However, at least Reynaldo and Michael seem to be still working on ffserver,
> > so gratuitously removing it now would be rather unfriendly.  
> 
> A sudden surge in interest product of the decision to kill it and *long after*
> calls for developers to prevent it from bitrotting in the first place that
> pretends to be blocking is not proper and far from nice.
> Reynaldo agreed to move ffserver to a separate repo in time for the next
> release as he stated in an email, and then work on making it not depend on
> the ffm de/muxers since those have to go with the next major bump, or with
> AVStream->codec at the latest. Pretending to turn that effort into an
> argument against the removal is a crappy thing to do.
> 
> The choice and the announcement were made months ago, and those who cared
> participated in the discussions and the relevant patches. Backing out at
> the very last second is extremely unprofessional and will kill any future
> trust people will have in decisions made and announced in public channels.
> 
> It's already embarrassing that ffserver made it to 3.2. Lets try to keep
> the image that this is a serious project.

I'd like to add that removing the ffserver support from the libs, and
all deprecated stuff it depends on, will make it actually easier to
readd ffserver in a cleaner way. It reduces the risk that the new
ffserver accidentally depends on mechanisms that were supposed to go
away.

Also, the promise was that developers would pick up ffserver again and
update it. This hasn't really happened - instead it weirdly looks like
the ffserver faction is stalling for time. Maybe the interest to keep
it alive isn't that high after all.


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