[FFmpeg-devel] [RFC] How to become release maintainer

[James Almer]

On 8/5/2019 11:58 AM, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 05, 2019 at 10:47:56AM -0300, James Almer wrote:
>> On 8/5/2019 10:35 AM, Reto Kromer wrote:
>>> James Almer wrote:
>>>
>>>>>> master nb_commits % 1500 == 0.
>>>
>>>> And if you make the cut as strict as you suggest, you'll surely
>>>> get broken releases.
>>>
>>> I fully agree that such an orthodoxy would result in broken
>>> releases.
>>>
>>> Seen this from a user of releases perspective, a good compromise
>>> between availability of new features and deployment of a new
>>> version would be a few months, such as one release per season.
>>> Hope this input is useful for the discussion.
>>>
>>> Best regards, Reto
>>
>> That is the current schedule. It used to be one every three months, give
>> or take a month, then changed to six months once that stopped being true.
>> The issue is that 4.2 is being delayed way too much, fast approaching a
>> year now, apparently because Michael (Who handles releases) is dealing
>> with a constant influx of new issues reported by fuzzers, most of which
>> he considers a security concern.
> 
> with releases every 3 months several people complained that there are
> too many releases. 

Yes. On top of increasing maintenance work (mostly from you) by having
more releases that potentially required backported commits in point
releases.

> 
> I agree that 4.2 is delayed too much, ill make that release soon, just
> wanted to give the latest sec fixes a ~day on the ML for reviews.
> 
> It does seem judging from the unhappyness with a 3months shedule and
> the now unhappyness with a almost 9? month that 6 month is the sweet spot.
> So ill aim towards maybe 5months in the future and with unexpected delays
> we will then achieve a 6 months release cycle.

Six months is a sweet spot, yeah. Ideally, we'd bump major once a year
to clean structs and remove deprecated API, and only worry about ABI
compatibility between two releases.

> 
> About paul doing the releases, i think the work on codecs and filters
> and all the surroundings that he is doing currently is more valuable.
> 
> I appologize for the 4.2 release being late

Please take my suggestion into consideration. Every fuzzer reported
issue can't possibly be considered a blocker. A first point release
being made a week or two after the original should be enough to
implement fixes for the less important ones and prevent further delays
for the release proper.

Thanks for your work with the releases.