[FFmpeg-devel] Project orientation

[Andriy Gelman]

On Tue, 07. Jul 16:29, Oneric wrote:
> On Sun 2020 Jul 5 20:01 +0300 Kieran Kunhya <kieran618 at googlemail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Going back to the original point in hand.
> > Many patches aren't getting reviewed and pushed any more.
> > 
> > In part this is because in 2020 whether we like it or not mailing
> > lists are not the way to do Git based development.
> > The kernel is the exception to the rule, as Linus says it has a whole
> > load of grey-bearded system maintainers who are paid full time to work
> > on it.
> >
> > For new contributors git send-email is annoying. For people wanting to
> > push, the .mbox format is annoying, Gmail doesn't support it any more.
> > And you can't get new contributors to start using CLI based email
> > clients or run their own mail server, that's not going to happen.
> > 
> > A solution like Gitlab is the only way forward. It has worked well for
> > dav1d, it can run regression tests on all platforms for all commits:
> > https://code.videolan.org/videolan/dav1d
> > 
> > Merges are done with one push of a button. Yes, the branch sprawl is
> > not great but it's better than now.
> > It has inline patch reviews which are nice.
> > 
> > Whether we like it or not web interfaces are the way 95% of the world
> > does Git and we have to move with the times.
> 
> As someone who recently only submitted a single, simple patch, I haven't seen 
> mail-based dev as an annoyance, rather the contrary as this avoids the burden 
> of creating yet another account on some website, that I'll have to manage.
> 
> There also already seems to be some automatic testing, as Patchwork send me an 
> off-list mail about failing tests. (I did not set SAMPLES when running make 
> fate locally as it was not mentioned clearly on the main "Contribute" site on 
> the webpage. https://ffmpeg.org/developer.html .) It can probably be improved 
> though.
> 
> What was frustating however, was the lack of any form of response to the patch 
> for over a month, despite ml-pings.

> On top of that the revised patch with updated FATE-samples had to change files 
> with CRLF line endings that are not marked as such in .gitattributes. This 
> prompted patchwork to be unable to apply the patch. Even though this is the 
> only correct way to update these samples and left me concerned the patch might 
> be being silently ignored because it fails on patchworks.

Thanks for reminding. This should now be fixed on patchwork.

-- 
Andriy