[FFmpeg-user] [FFmpeg-devel] Areas needing work

[Timothy Gu]

On Sun, Apr 5, 2015 at 8:43 PM Michael Niedermayer <michaelni at gmx.at> wrote:

> Hi all
>
> There are various areas in the project that are not maintained as well as
> they
> should be, heres a certainly not comlpete list, dont hesitate to reply and
> add to it.
> If someone wants to pick something up and contribute that is VERY welcome
>
> * Post merge review&cleanup, changes merged from libav would benefit from
>   people reviewing and MUCH MUCH more importantly also people actually
> caring
>   about and taking responsibility not just dumping comments with the idea
>   "someone" will fix it.
>   Ideally each area would have a maintainer who takes care of it and
>   keeps it in good nick.
>
>
> * fate clients
>   we lack a armcc test, a real android test
>   someone should take over haiku and sunos/solaris fate clients, my haiku
> VM just
>   keeps crashing
>

I can take care of the Haiku test if I have (access to) a better/faster
computer…


> * our fate server lacks the ability to display a user specified release
>   this makes the output look quite unwieldy
>   Timothy was working on a rewrite
>

I haven't touched that thing in a few months but it's in a pretty good
shape. With a few minor updates it should be good to go at least on
fate-beta.ffmpeg.org or something like that. There are still a few minor
things I want to fix (like minirep/minilog, warning diff (is it really
useful now since most boxes are using make -jx and testing order changes
every time?), and some minor styling issue).

[...]

> * Decentralize
>   Too many things are done and admined by me, iam doing security updates
> to the
>   servers, doing the git merges, maintaining all releases, maintaining
> half the
>   fate clients, submitting data to coverity and doing all the crap that
> noone
>   else wants to do.
>   Does the community care so little that they want me to be a single point
> of
>   failure?
>   We need people to take some of this over at least on the basis of a
> backup
>   in case iam unavailable for whatever reason, and i think it should
> ideally
>   be people who do not yet have their daily work shedule overflowing with
> ffmpeg
>   work but better new volunteers.
>

- Project servers: MAINTAINERS list four people [1], one of which I have
never
  ever seen on this list, and it is not clear to me how the servers are
  administered (who pays for it? who has access to it? who has access to the
  hosting company's setting page?) [2]
- Git merges: when I first came to this project merges are still called
"Merge
  from remote tracking branch 'qatar/master'." WTF is qatar? Now of course
  that is not a problem any more, but the merges remain undocumented on any
  official documentation I could find (maybe I didn't look hard enough?). If
  the behavior itself is not known publicly how can anyone help?
- Coverity: one can easily hook it up to a FATE box.

[1]: https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/blob/master/MAINTAINERS#L48
[2]: Yes I guess I can ask on IRC or whatever but I am lazy, and I know that
     there are people lazier than me. If it is so hard to find out how to
     *volunteer* I would not imagine many people trying to volunteer.

But anyway, I can volunteer to take over coverage.ffmpeg.org. But again who
should I find to discuss this thing in detail? Michael? Clément? I don't
know.

Also a news article on a call for maintainers would be beneficial (?).

Timothy