[MPlayer-dev-eng] [RFC] Some modest proposals

[Luca Barbato]

On the wave of some patches (some supported by me) that aim to
cleanup/thin up the code, I guess it's better to clarify what I'd like
to do.

I noticed that contributing to mplayer is _definitely_ less fun than
contributing to ffmpeg, being the people pretty much the same.

I think the main reasons are that the code is ugly in most parts and
quite irregular and the many parts aren't commented nor documented.

Since cleaning up and documenting can be a daunting task I considered
sane trying to first remove cruft or duplicated features.

Obviously trying during the linuxtag to do that starting to libmpeg2
didn't lead to a completely good result, at least nowadays.

Anyway this is my wouldbe checklist for mplayer:

- document what's not cruft but just an obscure feature. (e.g. libmpeg2
quantizers exposed to fine tune post processing)

- remove the cruft (including the private forks of libraries we
currently have)

- reformat every line of code to match ffmpeg coding style.

- switch to git in a way or another and put official mirrors on github
and gitorious (so we might get more people involved)


I know already that some would not agree about the last two points and
that the first two are a bit daunting as tasks, yet I hope we could get
some agreement about that.

lu

-- 

Luca Barbato
Gentoo/linux
http://dev.gentoo.org/~lu_zero