[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH] Merge libavcore into libavutil

Alexander Strasser eclipse7
Mon Feb 14 01:15:17 CET 2011


Diego Biurrun wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 09, 2011 at 09:46:03PM -0500, Ronald S. Bultje wrote:
[...]
> > 
> > The split between lavu and lavcore is completely random. The use
> > case
> > has been mentioned numerous times ("lavu can be used outside
> > multimedia applications") but whenever we request evidence that it's
> > actually widely used - say, similarly widely as lavcodec or
> > lavformat
> > - everybody ignores these requests. That's frustrating and makes us
> > not bother considering the objections.

  There is something swinging in your tone that says this is not at
all about merging libs and stuff.

  Also saying that you don't take objections of other people serious
(that might be valid objections) is very rude!

> +1

  Where did you request evidence? So everything depends on current
popularity.  We won't start merging other libraries together only
if they get unpopular at some point in the future, will we?

> It has also never been marketed as something to be used outside of
> programs that directly use FFmpeg.  Without some marketing this will
> never happen.  There are billions of lines of code out there, you
> need to tell people that there is a good reason to read these particular
> ones.  I haven't seen any of this in the past and I do not expect it
> in the future.

  Exactly, it has never been marketed. But that means only that there
is no problem. It is perfect neutrality at best.

  Who said this will never happen? Or that no other events will help
spreading the usage of lavu?



  But to come back to the main point I will make in this post, please
let me tell you a little story. Once there was an application that
needed some routines to convert some values read from a stream into
floating point values. That was already possible in a portable manner
with routines from an external library. But that library was not a
mandatory dependency. So the routines could not be used unconditionally.
A discussion for a solution to the problem, led to the idea to split
tiny generally useful parts, not specifically related to the domain of
the library in question into a different library. After that the
application was able to unconditionally depend on the new small
library and use the routines from there.

  The first library mentioned is lavc and the split library is lavu.
So as you can conclude for yourself there is at least one application
that depends only on lavu but not necessarily on lavc. Finding out the
name of that application is left as an exercise to the reader.

  Alexander



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