[FFmpeg-user] man page vs. online documentation

[Carl Eugen Hoyos]

Jim Worrall <coniophora <at> gmail.com> writes:

> >> Is it better to get the latest snapshot?
> > 
> > If you are not a distributor but a user, you are strongly encouraged to use
> > current git head (instead of a release): It always contains more features
> > and less bugs.
> > 
> > If you believe that this is not clearly explained on 
> > http://ffmpeg.org/download.html please suggest improvements.
> 
> Thank you, yes, I am a user (well I have hardly used it, just have fun
> trying to figure it out).  I just got what I think was the latest snapshot:

> ffmpeg version 0.8.7.git-1fd6924  and the

Used to be recent when you wrote the mail, yes.

> man page with it pretty much matches the online doc.
> 
> I should have read that page you linked to a little more carefully.  That
> said, I couldn't suggest improvements unless I understood it better.  It does

> explain that "releases" are snapshots of certain times, but why they are made
> or how they are different from regular snapshots of that time I don't know.

Me (mostly) neither.
(For a very long time, FFmpeg did not provide releases. After repeated requests,
releases are now provided, but as said, they are primarily interesting for
distributors.)

> One sees references to a lot of terms on the mailing list: snapshot,
> git master, git head - it would be nice to define those, indicate which are 

Snapshots are the head versions of master branch at the time of download.

> synonyms if any, and have some way to identify them as such on the actual 
> repository.  But I certainly understand also it is up to fairly ignorant users
> like me to learn as much as possible on their own.  As you can tell, I don't
> use git.

We all had to get used to it.

Carl Eugen