[FFmpeg-devel] Resurrection of ffserver

[Lukasz Marek]

On 17.09.2016 22:27, Rostislav Pehlivanov wrote:
> On 17 September 2016 at 20:58, Michael Fritscher <
> michael.fritscher at telematik-zentrum.de> wrote:
>
>> Good day,
>>
>> I read the sad news about ffservers a few days ago and have already
>> written some mails to ffmpeg-user.
>>
>> I would like to step in to make ffserver maintainable and distributable
>> again, especially because of the many users depending on ffserver -
>> including myself. I'm capable of C and had made some tiny changes to ffmpeg
>> already, but I'm a beginner regarding the architecture and "unwritten
>> rules" of ffmpeg development. Additionally, I would like to discuss
>> strategic decisions with the main developers to avoid useless work.
>>
> I really think ffserver is better off being in a separate repository. That
> way there'd be some finer attention brought to keeping the API usable by
> external users too. Same with the rest of the programs.
> So yeah, if you want, just make a separate repository somewhere with only
> ffserver.c and a configure + makefile and try to make something better and
> usable.

I don't want to declare my statement here what should be done, but there 
is one more thing you didn't mention. ffserver depends on some specific 
components located inside ffmpeg libraries. At least on ffm mux/demux. 
They cannot be moved. The problem is, people sometimes opens ticket with 
error report like that: "I used version X, released about year ago and 
it worked fine. Now I upgraded and it doesn't work" Keeping it 
everything in one repo allows you to use bisection to find where the 
problem were introduced. Where you keep it in separate repositories it 
become much more complex. Now when you move back in repo history, you 
know all tools will compile (unless some commits are pushed in wrong 
order), when you have more repositories then you have to correlate it.