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

[Allan Sandfeld Jensen]

On Friday 06 October 2006 00:42, Roman Shaposhnick wrote:
> 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.
>
You know other projects sometimes adds rules to the system to make it less 
random, such as adding no new features for a period of time and concentrate 
on fixing bugs.
This ofcourse slows down development and leads to overhead. This is the price 
you need to pay to be a stable and more directly used library. As it is now 
FFMPEG is useless directly and only usefull through third parties that does 
all the bugfixing that doesn't happen here.

I have no problem with the way with the way this is developed, but you should 
really be (your word)honest about it. It makes no sense for FFMPEG to install 
versioned pkg-config files for instance, when they match no specific releases 
and has no specific guarantees of features or stability.


`Allan