[FFmpeg-cvslog] AVDictionary: warn about its shortcommings and mention available replacements.

[Stefano Sabatini]

On date Tuesday 2011-06-28 04:31:11 +0200, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> ffmpeg | branch: master | Michael Niedermayer <michaelni at gmx.at> | Tue Jun 28 04:10:40 2011 +0200| [c029ea39bd58905d7a15ad7e1eb7991447606974] | committer: Michael Niedermayer
> 
> AVDictionary: warn about its shortcommings and mention available replacements.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Michael Niedermayer <michaelni at gmx.at>
> 
> > http://git.videolan.org/gitweb.cgi/ffmpeg.git/?a=commit;h=c029ea39bd58905d7a15ad7e1eb7991447606974
> ---
> 
>  libavutil/dict.h |    7 +++++++
>  1 files changed, 7 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
> 
> diff --git a/libavutil/dict.h b/libavutil/dict.h
> index 421be32..dc575eb 100644
> --- a/libavutil/dict.h
> +++ b/libavutil/dict.h
> @@ -19,6 +19,13 @@
>  
>  /**
>   * @file Public dictionary API.
> + * @deprecated
> + *  AVDictionary is provided for compatibility with libav. It is both in
> + *  implementation as well as API inefficient. It doesnt scale and is
> + *  be extreemly slow with large dictionaries.
> + *  It is recommanded that new code uses our tree container from tree.c/h
> + *  where applicable.
> + *  Which uses AVL trees to achive O(log n) performance

I was concerned with the efficiency issues (which should be unrelevant
for small sets).

Though the tree.[ch] API is much more complicated than this. I supose
an alternative would be to make this a proper hash dictionary (which
would possibly require complicating the API).