[FFmpeg-devel] Broken third party software

Luca Abeni lucabe72
Sun Sep 14 13:29:29 CEST 2008


Hi Frans,

Frans de Boer wrote:
> Ok, how else would you call a product which has almost every day changes
> and for which there is no substitute in the form an archive. Suppose,
> that I started yesterday using FFmpeg because libquicktime and/or
> cinelerra are asking for it. I can not get it compiled and I have no
> clue which SVN version I need to get it compiled - assuming I am that
> advanced that I know how to use the SVN command!?
[...]

I think in your emails you highlight two different issues:
1) libavcodec recently increased its major version, changing the API
    and breaking the compatibility with the old API.
    Since there is a "major version" number documenting this, I think it
    is not a big issue: if LIBAVCODEC_VERSION_MAJOR is less than 52, user
    programs must use the old API, otherwise they must use the new API.
    svn annotate or svn log can easily point to r15262 as the version which
    broke the old API, so developer of applications using libavcodec can
    point to r15261 until their programs are updated.
    These changes do not happen very often (I think the last one was some
    years ago?), so the "every day changes" part of your email obviously
    does not apply here.
2) there are no stable releases. You have a point here, and as far as I
    remember this thing has already been discussed in the past. If I
    remember well, the conclusion was that there are no stable releases
    because there is no volunteer for handling such releases.
    My understanding is that if someone skilled enough volunteers as a
    "release manager" he will be given svn access and everything he needs
    (I hope people will correct me if this understanding is wrong).
    After all, this is free software: you cannot force people to work on
    some particular issues because you think they are important (unless
    such people receive money for working on ffmpeg).


				Luca




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