[FFmpeg-devel] release feedback

[Diego Biurrun]

On Sat, Mar 14, 2009 at 09:16:32PM +0000, Robert Swain wrote:
> On 14/3/09 19:06, Diego Biurrun wrote:
> >
> > The target audience for this release were distributions and projects or
> > companies reusing FFmpeg.  From what I have heard they received exactly
> > what they wanted.
> 
>  From whom have you heard?

Debian, Fedora, Alt Linux, BSD and a few other packagers, gstreamer,
Xiph, FOMS, GNOME people, to name a few.  Google for FFmpeg release
and you will find more.

> > As for the release process, it could surely be improved.  It was bad
> > luck that roundup broke at the time we wanted to have the bug fixing
> > weekend.  I had hoped that more people would be motivated to work on
> > fixing bugs during this weekend.  Some actually did, but the interest
> > was not overwhelming.
> 
> At least the website got a face lift. ;)

Yes, that was nice as well.

> One item of note that is not related to this thread: while Attila is an 
> excellent server administrator and provides us with a very good server, 
> the response time for the server 'failure' we experienced severely 
> stunts development.

A day of downtime every other year or even less is quite a good service
and does IMO not noticeably affect development.

> > One question that remains is whether we should repeat this regularly or
> > at all.  Given the positive feedback, I believe we should institute a
> > regular release schedule.  I envision time-based releases every 3 or 6
> > months.  After some thought, 6 months sounds preferable.  It is less
> > disruptive to the development process and a schedule that seem to work
> > well in a lot of other FOSS projects.
> 
> I would like 3-monthly releases.

Why?

> [.. long description ..]
>  From what I perceive, this is actually what we did for 0.5 as we had to 
> back out a few changes that had been made in trunk at the point at which 
> we branched to make the code base feasibly releasable.

So in summary this means no process changes.  Pick a revision to base
releases on and identify regressions.

> > There is one issue for which I would make an exception right now:
> > LGPL libswscale.
> >
> > Making libswscale compile as LGPL would make it usable for a broader
> > audience of projects / users that cannot use it as GPL.  Furthermore,
> > the README in the release is already ambiguous about the issue and
> > it just requires adjusting one or two #ifdefs, so there cannot really
> > be any regressions.
> 
> Do you just intend to backport making libswscale compile under LGPL or 
> also rip out imgconvert? I'm guessing the former. If so, I think that 
> would be reasonable. If not, I don't.

Just the former of course.

Diego