[Ffmpeg-devel] [PATCH] Staticising mpeg12data header

[Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò]

On Tuesday 19 September 2006 18:40, Rich Felker wrote:
> Arrg, why does flameeyes keep pushing these OS-specific hacks?
This is NOT os-specific, this works on */Linux, *BSD, Darwin, ...

> but since it's GNU brain damage everyone 
> keeps entertaining his broken solutions...
I don't see how ensuring the exported interface can be considered braindamage. 
A pain to do the first time, maybe, but not an error. By ensuring a proper 
interface is provided, you're also making it safe for other projects to use 
FFmpeg without using symbols that might change behaviour, format or who knows 
what else. VLC for instance was using a table that was not supposed to be 
exported in the first place, up to a couple of months ago.

> If shared libs are this broken then *gasp* don't use shared libs!
Usage of static libraries to link FFmpeg is sub-optimal for at least two 
projects currently using FFmpeg (xine and VLC), that both use a plugins-based 
architecture. In addition to that, statically linking FFmpeg will become an 
extra burden for package maintainers, and a problem from a security point of 
view (because you'd need to identify all the programs linking to FFmpeg and 
rebuild them every time a vulnerability is discovered).

The burden of using explicit visibility is only initial, because there are all 
the symbols to sort out, but after that the work is done, and internal 
symbols can be changed without caring about the external ABI (if they are not 
exported, they are no more part of ABI).

Plus, you get the interesting upside of having better performance with shared 
libraries, that I still find useful even if I know lot of people disagree 
with the usage of shared libraries in the first place.

-- 
Diego "Flameeyes" Petten? - http://farragut.flameeyes.is-a-geek.org/
Gentoo/Alt lead, Gentoo/FreeBSD, Video, AMD64, Sound, PAM, KDE
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