[Ffmpeg-devel] I'm giving up

[Uoti Urpala]

On Wed, 2006-11-22 at 21:48 -0500, Rich Felker wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 22, 2006 at 11:31:50AM +0200, Uoti Urpala wrote:
> > On Tue, 2006-11-21 at 14:59 +0100, Reimar D?ffinger wrote:
> > > I'd like to say though that at the rate that ffmpeg evolves 50 lines of
> > > only suboptimal code will become 500 lines of mess in no time. Look at
> > > some of the code in MPlayer (e.g. mplayer.c) if you need "proof"...
> > 
> > I think mplayer.c isn't a good example. The mess there was more a result
> > of a misguided development policy that discouraged all "cosmetic"
> > changes rather than a result of patches that were "suboptimal code" by
> 
> The horribleness of mplayer.c has nothing to do with development
> policy on cosmetic changes.

It does have a lot to do with that. Note that I'm talking about the
general opposition to changes that do not directly add functionality,
not just about whitespace changes or such. As I summarized the bad
development policy in the part you snipped: adding each new feature as a
minimally intrusive patch and never changing existing code unless
absolutely necessary.

>  Please stop this FUD.

FUD? Against what? Are you saying you favor the kind of development
policy described above so much that you consider anything with a
negative view of it to be FUD?

>  It's a result of the
> original "design" whereby someone who didn't know how to design a
> program at all hacked together glue for a bunch of library code.

With the better development policy it could have improved over time. Now
it worsened.