Now, that I got people talking...

[Ricardo Garcia]

On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 6:17 PM, Jeff Spaleta <jspaleta at gmail.com> wrote:

> Unless the ffmpeg developers show a complete unwillingness to work
> with us, then I will actively and vocally discourage any call to fork
> the codebase.  Its not clear to me if there has been a reasonable
> discussion inside ffmpeg about the possibility of restructuring the
> codebase if there were developers interested in doing it as part of
> the ffmpeg roadmap.

>From what I've read in various web rants, I think they're not
interested... particularly I mean this long discussion thread,
entitled "Using ffmpeg libs in an OSS project is a nightmare" -
http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2005-August/002989.html
which was linked from this blog page: http://glandium.org/blog/?p=148.

The entry says:

--- snip ---
Guess what happens when someone complains to ffmpeg developers that
their software management and API suck. Well, he gets answered
repeatedly to include a CVS snapshot of ffmpeg and link statically
against it, "like everyone does". Splendid.
--- /snip ---

More disturbing is comment 9039 at the blog, by one of the actual
ffmpeg devs (and this was written in August last year) :

--- snip ---
Justin Says:
That link to the ffmpeg-devel archives is 2 years old. Not that the
problem has gotten any better, but there have at least been some good
discussions on the topic since then. Inevitably they all lead to the
same end though. The typical response from FFmpeg developers (and I am
one of them) to making official releases is "we really don't have the
time. do you have the time? do you want to do it?". So as long as
nobody volunteers, it won't get done. It's not that most of us
wouldn't like to see nice, clean, stable releases, it's that it is a
*volunteer* project with nobody currently willing to give the time and
effort to take on the task of release management. Gasper suggested
that someone set up a site for unofficial releases. Well it's easier
than that; just volunteer to create and maintain official ones."
--- /snip ---

Personally, I think stopping ffmpeg development for 2, 3 or even 6
months to do a code restructuring is indeed worth it (the mozilla guys
did it, and now we have Firefox thanks to them). Perhaps it would be
nice to ask the ffmpeg devs again, who knows? It might just work -
specially coming from the Fedora marketing team ;-)