[FFmpeg-devel] [RFC] Releases

[Alex Converse]

On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 2:07 PM, Reinhard Tartler <siretart at tauware.de> wrote:
> On Mo, Mai 31, 2010 at 19:19:38 (CEST), Ronald S. Bultje wrote:
>
>> On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 11:34 AM, Reinhard Tartler <siretart at tauware.de> wrote:
>>> On Mo, Mai 31, 2010 at 17:10:18 (CEST), Ronald S. Bultje wrote:
>>>> Back to FFmpeg. Michael (and many others) would like releases out,
>>>> and hate the classical caricature of releases, because we want
>>>> features for end users (that's anyone that uses an application that
>>>> uses FFmpeg). Now, for example, we'd like users to have vp8 decoding
>>>> support (let's leave the licensing issue aside for a second). In the
>>>> past, that might've been any other codec. That is the veyr point of
>>>> our existence. Running out the next 0.5.x doesn't help achieve this
>>>> purpose, which is why we care less about it.
>>>>
>>>> We'd like a release system that achieves the purpose of getting the
>>>> next big-format decoder to as many end users as possible in the
>>>> least amount of time. Can we think of a release system that achieves
>>>> this?
>>>
>>> I see no problem in backporting features like libvpx support to
>>> ffmpeg-0.5, since it has little potential for regressions.
>>
>> What about (AAC/)SBR? (AAC/)PS? I'm not sure what else is missing but
>> I think WMAVoice, Sipro are also not part of 0.5.x. MMS-TCP?
>>
>> More generally, I'm trying to ask how much you're willing to backport
>> (assuming you do releases, which I'm very much in favour of).
>
> I have always considered any backport nominations by the corresponding
> and responsible maintainer.
>
> For more introsive backports however I have to ask for a) a proposed
> patch and b) a sufficient risk analysis wrt potential regressions.
>
> For 0.5, we had an WMAPro backport proposed, but the maintainer had
> serious concerns with that, so we rejected that backport. As for
> AAC/SBR, if that is backportable easily with acceptable risk of
> regressions, sure, why not?
>

I think there is a medium regression risk on backporting SBR. It
involves some nontrivial changes inside the aac decoder. Several of
these trickled in between the 0.5 branch being made but well before
SBR landed. There were also some avformat changes to make ffplay play
nice with implicit SBR.

Therefore my personal wish on this is NACK.

Sorry,
Alex Converse