[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH] configure: don't build ffserver unless explicitly enabled

[Hendrik Leppkes]

On Sun, Sep 11, 2016 at 7:52 PM, Sven C. Dack <sven.c.dack at sky.com> wrote:
> On 11/09/16 18:27, Clément Bœsch wrote:
>>
>> Aside from the stdout output in ffprobe, no stdout/stderr output is
>> standardized in FFmpeg and thus can be changed at will (and does
>> regularly). You can try to parse it, but there is zero warranty that it
>> will work the next day.
>>
>> Regards,
>
>
> Did you at least read the second part of my mail? Because I sure do get you
> don't care. It's all you, Nicolas and Hendrik have been saying here really.
> What I want you to do is to snap out of it and to start caring. Put the
> message where it belongs, meaning, put it into the documentation. ffserver
> is not dead just yet and you should really follow the regular coding rules
> until it is. And of course do users often have to accept the consequences of
> a changes, but they also only ever will do so when a change brings an actual
> gain. Nobody wants to accept a useless change. Your change, to put a message
> to stderr into the code, just has no gain for anyone who is using it and can
> only upset. Can we agree on this or am I talking to a wall?
>

We don't care because "caring" would severly limit the things we can
change in the code. Do we have to argue everytime we want to extend a
warning or error message in the future? No, we really do not want to
start doing that, and thus we will also not now.
There are limits to how much "stability" we can realistically provide,
and warnings/errors on the console are not part of that.

- Hendrik