[FFmpeg-devel] [RFC] 5 year plan & Inovation

[Stefano Sabatini]

On date Wednesday 2024-04-17 19:21:39 -0700, Aidan wrote:
> The best option is to figure stuff out.
[...]
> I use FFmpeg to download HLS streams from the internet or convert files
> like probably most people do. FFmpeg is the ultimate way of doing this
> because there is no better option.
> 
> But there are issues:
[...]

> I submitted a patch for a TTML decoder because I thought it would be great.
> It was completely ignored.

Please ping the patch or send a new one.

> If my patch was seriously bad, then fine. But seriously *no one cared*.

I think contribution management is a serious issue here.

What happens when you send a patch is that if you're lucky someone
will be interested and put some effort to review and eventually get it
pushed, which depending on several factors might require several
interactions.

Sometimes contributors are side-tracked or frustrated and the review
process is interrupted. Sometimes the reviewer won't reply, and the
review also might be stuck (in this case you might want to ping the
patch).

Sometimes there is no qualified or interested developer around, or
maybe those ones are busy with other things (and it's easy to miss
a patch, especially if you don't check emails since a few days and you
got hundreds of backlog emails).

In general, this is done on a best effort basis (read as: most
developers are volunteers and they might have job/families/stuff to
tend to), there is no guarantee that a patch might be reviewed in a
timely fashion.

This is not a problem specific with FFmpeg, but in general with most
FLOSS projects.

Probably we should find ways to fund such activites, so that a
developer can spend more time on reviewing work, but this comes with
other risks/issues (since managing money is also complex of potential
tensions in a mostly volunteering-based project).

It's also very difficult to track the sent patches, and that's why
having a Pull-Request process a-la github has been proposed several
times; we cannot switch to github for several reasons (licensing and
affilitation issues with platform owner) and handling your own gitlab
is costly and we lack volunteers at the moment.

We are using patchwork to mitigate the tracking issue:
https://patchwork.ffmpeg.org/project/ffmpeg/list/

but that's not really providing an effective workflow.

Personally I find the status tracking confusing, e.g.:
https://patchwork.ffmpeg.org/project/ffmpeg/list/?series=&submitter=&state=&q=TTML&archive=both&delegate=

I cannot easily figure out what was integrated and what not.