[FFmpeg-devel] What's up with the API and ABI?

[Reimar Döffinger]

On 26 Apr 2011, at 18:29, Luca Abeni <lucabe72 at email.it> wrote:
> since the infamous ffmpeg/libav split, a good number of programs using ffmpeg libraries started to break because of arbitrary renamings... That's annoying (it forces me to fill the programs with funky ifdefs to support the git checkout of the day), but I can live with it.

This should not be related to that (except for maybe reduced review of changes), but only due to the major version change.
If you have such problems with the oldabi branch those are bugs, please report them!

> So, if you really want to rename url_fopen() (why? Just because avio_open() is more trendy?) you have to either remove url_fopen() and its flags, or update the flags values. Keeping a broken url_fopen() is much worse than removing it without deprecation.

For the oldabi neither removing nor changing the values is an option, but I don't think that change happened there? For the main branch it should be removed.
Note that a good reason for the rename is a lower risk for name clashes.
Reserving all names starting with av might work, however reserving all names starting with url is asking a bit much, url is far too common to be a name prefix safe to avoid name clashes.