[Ffmpeg-devel] BeOS support to be discontinued Feb 1 2007

Måns Rullgård mru
Tue Dec 12 01:16:46 CET 2006


Parts of libavformat are currently riddled with special cases for
BeOS.  This special casing is making everyday code maintenance
increasingly difficult, and flies in the face of our commitment to
write clean, portable code.

We have repeatedly asked the BeOS users (Francois et al) to clean up
the mess, only to be met with silence.

In light of the above, we regrettably have only one remaining option:
dropping BeOS support.

If the BeOS users wish to see continued support for their OS of
choice, they have until February 1 2007 to come up with a clean
solution for whatever the issues may be.  If by that time we have seen
some serious efforts to set things straight, we will of course extend
the deadline within reasonable bounds.

My sincere hope is that this mail will finally awaken someone who is
both willing and capable to sort this out.  Dropping support for a
platform, no matter how obscure, is never a fun thing to do.

Before the flaming starts, I would like to point to the situation on
win32.  A few months ago we were receiving reports on a daily basis
regarding compilation and runtime issues with both cygwin and mingw.
Many proposals were made, most of them rejected for much the same
reasons we wish to clean up the BeOS support.  Nevertheless, through
the efforts of a few dedicated users, we managed to achieve full
functionality on win32 without resorting to ugly hacks.

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




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