Advocating periodic releases (was: Re: [Ffmpeg-devel] Re: Fwd: Request ...)

[Roman Shaposhnick]

On Thu, 2006-10-05 at 18:22 -0400, Mikhail Teterin wrote:
> >   I think you fail to understand the difference between the notions of a
> > Project and a Product.
> 
> I don't see, how this distinction is relevant to my request to have periodic 
> (semi-)stable releases of ffmpeg available for download.

  We have them. They are called nightly snapshots. Now, if you were 
to ask us to spend our time on evaluating and telling you which of 
the snapshots we consider to be more stable than the other ones -- 
you would be asking us to do *YOUR* job. Not a nice thing to do
unless you can also give us some incentive.

  Of course, one of the best kept secret of the opensource world
is how they lie to you when they label a particular nightly snapshot
a stable release based on their gut feel and vacation schedule. 
Personally -- I don't really want to be part of that. FFmpeg's way
is an honest one.

> > Cinerella would be a product, just like the Linux kernel is a project
> 
> Both Cinerella and Linux kernel have releases.

  We do to. Linux releases about once a couple months -- we release
every night. What's the difference ?

> Whether ffmpeg is a project or a product, there need to be releases of it to 
> facilitate porting and to make it easier for applications (products?) to rely 
> on the already built/installed version instead of bundling their own.

  That would be a mistake. The best way to use FFmpeg is to privatize
its source code inside your project (and yes, for closed source 
projects that means a bit of extra work -- sorry), configure it to
only build bits and pieces you care about and link with it. Statically.

  Want to start to a UNIX codec Paraphernalia ? No problem. Just come
up with a sensible architecture (and NO -- just putting libavcodec.so
into your /usr/lib is NOT a sensible architecture) use FFmpeg source
code and take care of building, packaging and testing. Everybody will
thank you for that.

  Oh, and don't forget to send us a link to your project, once you're
done and once every UNIX distro has it ;-)

Thanks,
Roman.