[Ffmpeg-devel] Using ffmpeg libs in an OSS project is a nightmare

[Dave Airlie]

> 
> We have suggested static linking several times and all the answer we get
> is "I don't want to.".  How is that different?

static linking ignores the issue, if everyone is to keep their own
fork of the codebase they benefits of having a library are reduced,
static linking is not a solution to any problem it is a workaround...

> 
> Making good releases takes much more than that.  I have updated the
> ChangeLog for the last few MPlayer releases and boy I can tell you it's
> a tedious task that takes more hours than you would expect it to.  For
> the last release I was tired of doing it and it took me quite some
> effort to recruit someone from the "Hey, let's make a release!"-crowd to
> do it instead of me.  After finishing he said "Hats off to the people
> who have been doing this for the previous releases."

I don't think anyone has requested high quality releases at this time,
I think what most external project would like are sync points, where
you say well the CVS tree was considered stable at this point, none of
the main developers were in the middle of a large sweeping change that
affects the whole project... stick a version number on it, drop a
tarball say here's a good point to work with until the next one, the
issue with working with CVS tarballs is at any point the only people
who know what state they are in are the developers working on it, so
the external project maintainer has to spend an inappropriate amount
of time tracking changes made to CVS to see if what is there might be
a good idea to incorporate into their own fork....

> http://mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2005-June/002242.html

All good ideas if you want a major release, I'm not sure people want
or need this at this stage, maybe if you start small by just doing
sync points people might be more willing to join in and do the
rest....

Things like Changelogs aren't hugely necessary if you have CVS trees,
in Xorg we make people to the Changelog on every CVS commit, in the
kernel the Changelog is the commit list since the last one... 
spending time transcribing CVS commits into Changelog files for a
release isn't the way forward and I can understand why anyone doing so
would get annoyed at having to do a release...

Dave.