[FFmpeg-devel] [RFC] avpriv cleanup

[Nicolas George]

Michael Niedermayer (2018-03-25):
> looking at what we have as avprivs, in the tree, i think some of these
> could be indeed usefull as public APIs. And we need to already keep them
> compatible as they are exported as avpriv too, so making such changes does
> indeed in some cases look like a good idea to me
> 
> There are some avprivs we have currently though that are quite specific
> to format intgernals, i dont think that its always a flaw to use avpriv
> functions thus

The reason some functions are avpriv instead of public is quite simple:
it was considered too much effort to keep them stable enough to make
them public.

For these cases, we have the ff_ prefix, it works perfectly. But for
some reason, somebody decided to make several separate libraries for
this single project. Hence the avpriv prefix, which is exported but not
public, with functions that are supposed to be... we don't know how
stable. There is an implicit policy that shared lav* must all have the
same version, but nothing ensures that technically.

The whole mess stems from a huge core flaw: having separate libraries.
It does not bring any benefit (at least, any benefit that could not be
achieved otherwise without the drawbacks) and makes everything more
complicated.

So could we please stop beating around the bush and possibly address the
actual issue?

Regards,

-- 
  Nicolas George
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