[FFmpeg-devel] Project orientation

[Gerion Entrup]

Hi,

Am Donnerstag, 9. Juli 2020, 02:56:28 CEST schrieb Manolis Stamatogiannakis:
> On Tue, 7 Jul 2020 at 16:27, Nicolas George <george at nsup.org> wrote:
> > > Is tree threading that important? A PR is essentially a single thread of
> > > discussion.
> >
> > It is a single thread of discussion until the discussion becomes complex
> > and has branches.
> >
> 
> This doesn't sound like the common case.
> But it should be straightforward to get some statistics on that from the
> list archives when a transition is officially discussed.

This whole current discussion here would be a lot more confusing without
branches.

Maybe you like the Gentoo approach: Do the majority of changes in pull
requests, in Gentoo this are changes of packages, here it would be
changes on codecs/demuxers/filters/etc. And then do all changes of the
framework itself and discussions via mailinglist. In Gentoo this are
changes of eclasses (i.e. code libraries for packages). For FFmpeg it
would be the introduction of new API, API changes, decoupling or merging
of libraries etc.

The first is likely to produce no to little (conflicting) discussion,
has a huge benefit from CI, is the part where most of the newcomers begin
development and includes a lot of easy tasks. Here by far the most
developments happens.

The latter is likely to produce huge discussions, needs deep knowledge
of the libraries, so it is not likely done by newcomers and has little
gain from CI since it adds e.g. something completely new. Here happens
not so much development in terms of frequency or code lines but the
impact is much higher.

Just a suggestion, since I follow both projects...

Regards,
Gerion