[Libav-user] Would anyone find an OS X / Cocoa / Swift wrapper for Libav useful?

[Carl Eugen Hoyos]

Bradley O'Hearne <brado at ...> writes:

> thorough understanding of design/architecture/API 
> function and ability to have productive discourse 
> on such topics are pre-requisites to contributing.

This is simply not true.
On the contrary, starting to send patches did and 
will - through the review process - help 
contributors to get the thorough understanding.

A few random remarks:
If you want to write a wrapper for FFmpeg, please do 
so. If you believe it makes sense to tell us you 
will write a wrapper (I believe it does make sense) 
tell us (as you did). But please do not expect 
everybody to agree and please don't try to convince 
everybody what a great idea it is (I have doubts).

(This is probably the moment where I should try to 
convince you how futile your attempt is - NIH, 
maintainability and complexity come to mind - but 
this is free software: Please do it and prove me 
wrong!)

If you think the documentation needs improvements 
(everybody agrees afaict), please send small (!) 
patches to the ffmpeg-devel mailing list. If you 
don't want to send small patches, don't mention 
that the documentation needs improvements, as said 
everybody knows it.

Time is the only limiting factor in FFmpeg 
development. This alone imo is a sufficient reason 
(not just explanation) why the core developers do 
not post here. The idea was probably that people 
like you who don't want to contribute but have some 
understanding about the API help other users.

I'd like to repeat that OSX is definitely no 
"stepchild" in FFmpeg development: On the contrary, 
I believe FFmpeg developers as a whole consider it 
a main platform and if you look the number of source 
files specific to OSX you will find sufficient proof.
(And note that if you believe that we are rude I'd 
like to inform you that claiming we don't care about 
OSX could also be read as an offense given the time 
some of us spend on supporting an operating system 
that we don't use regularly.)

As wm4 tried to explain, I am not a core developer, 
he (wm4) writes (iirc) less patches than I do but he 
knows the API well so he is the best support you can 
get here. If you don't like my (or his) attitude, 
consider that we are doing this in our free time, if 
you still don't like it, there is no easy solution 
(sorry!) - please don't post your questions on the 
developer mailing list, this is just rude.

Regarding the API (that I do not know well), I 
suspect what was said in this thread is (too) true: 
It mirrors how file formats (and codecs) are defined 
and this is typically not easy to understand. Note 
that the number of users who want to access more 
(internal) fields (and therefore an even more basic 
API) is not lower than the ones requesting a higher 
level API.

And the final note (after re-reading the above;-) ) 
is that I suspect your emails were simply to long to 
get an easy answer, this includes your note "I did 
post code on github" (I fear nobody who reads this 
list would download a software project to understand 
a question): Simple and short questions are 
typically much easier to answer.

Carl Eugen