[FFmpeg-devel] [RFC] Suggestion for a Nicer Integration with GitHub

[Soft Works]

Hi,

A while ago there was a discussion about moving forward and 
migrating the ffmpeg development process from the mailing list to 
another platform (like GitLab).
That discussion had died without further results and an important 
takeaway for me was that there are just too many that love this way 
of interaction and operation and would argue till the end of time 
against such changes. That’s not meant as a kind of criticism, just 
an assessment. There a those and those people with different 
preferences and no doubt that others, who are preferring a more 
modern and integrated approach like GitHub provides, would be as 
much rejective when told about having to switch to a mailing list 
based process.

But without doubt, a lot more developers could be attracted to 
participate in ffmpeg development when it would be accessible in a 
way like many developers are used to work these days. The ffmpeg 
mirror on GitHub has 354 PR’s (25k stars, 8k forks!) even though 
that there’s a big and clear warning shown that PRs won’t be 
accepted this way. I wonder how many PRs might get submitted once we 
could actually accept PRs from there.

My conclusion from the recent discussion was, that the only way to 
make a change that could find a larger base of agreement would be a 
solution that doesn’t make a change at all. What I mean by that is: 
no moving of the repository, no migration to another platform, no 
replacement of the mailing-list and leaving everything working 
as-is. Instead, just add something on-top of it that will allow all 
those “others” to better accommodate with ffmpeg development.
I had the idea to build some synchronization between Patchwork and 
GitHub in a way that it would mirror submitted patches as GitHub 
pull requests, I didn’t have the time to get on it.

Just recently, I discovered a very interesting project: 
https://gitgitgadget.github.io/

This is all about the development of Git itself, which is done via 
mailing list and they had the same problem, namely developers that 
could never be convinced of using GitHub instead of the mailing 
list. That’s how GitGitGadget came to life: 
https://github.com/gitgitgadget/gitgitgadget/blob/main/DESIGN.md

Now my suggestion – obviously – is: Adapt the GitGitGadget 
implementation and employ it for ffmpeg development.

Please let me know what you think about it.

softworkz