[Ffmpeg-devel] Re: On2 vs libvp62

Måns Rullgård mru
Fri Apr 21 19:12:29 CEST 2006


Rich Felker <dalias at aerifal.cx> writes:

> On Thu, Apr 20, 2006 at 08:50:34AM +0100, M?ns Rullg?rd wrote:
>> Rich Felker <dalias at aerifal.cx> writes:
>> 
>> > On Wed, Apr 19, 2006 at 08:36:39AM +0100, M?ns Rullg?rd wrote:
>> >> bad it is.  The reason bad closed source is perhaps more wide-spread
>> >> is that behind a bad commercial product there is usually a marketing
>> >> department that may be able to spin something that makes the product
>> >> sell despite its flaws.  An open source product is promoted by its
>> >> quality alone, meaning that the bad ones won't be used by many people.
>> >
>> > No, unfortunately "open source" has marketing departments too. Just
>> > look at Xiph.org! Or an even better example: Redhat and all their
>> > horrible bugware/bloatware (GNOME, gcc, glibc, ...).
>> 
>> OK, I partially agree with you there.  Gnome and KDE are indeed
>> monsters, and I don't use them.  I don't see why you bundle gcc and
>> glibc in this category though.  Neither is crammed full of dubious
>> features just for the sake of it, even if gcc could be improved in a
>> few places, and glibc is admittedly fairly large.
>
> Both are roughly 20-100 times as large as they should be.
>
> glibc _is_ full of dubious features. Take the list of functions
> defined in POSIX/SUSv3 and diff it against the list of symbols in
> glibc. The differences are all GNU extensions which no portable
> program (i.e. most all real-world programs) will use.

Glibc also implements many non-standard functions found in BSD, SysV
and other Unixes, making porting code from those systems to glibc
easier.  This is not fundamentally a bad thing.  I agree that
inventing extensions of their own is bad.

> gcc is full of nonstandard extensions which people _do_ use, making
> their programs extremely gcc-dependent. A few of these are useful;
> most are "dubious features".

Well, given that we both consider C++ dubious from the get-go...
Apart from that code that relies heavily on gcc extensions isn't all
that common.

-- 
M?ns Rullg?rd
mru at inprovide.com





More information about the ffmpeg-devel mailing list