[FFmpeg-devel] [RFC] The Big Bump

[Stefano Sabatini]

On date Thursday 2011-02-03 21:06:31 +0100, Reinhard Tartler encoded:
> On Thu, Feb 03, 2011 at 20:13:09 (CET), Diego Elio Petten? wrote:
> 
> > Il giorno gio, 03/02/2011 alle 16.35 +0100, Anton Khirnov ha scritto:
> >> 
> >> it's been suggested on IRC that we've accumulated enough new APIs and
> >> the associated cruft so the time to bump major for lavf and lavc is
> >> nigh. We should definitely do that before 0.7.
> >
> > I'd suggest doing this only if we can also ensure that no ff_* symbols
> > are left as interlib dependencies.
> 
> This sounds pretty reasonable to me.
> 
> As already mentioned, this is an excellent occasion for revisiting
> Stefanos error code concern in avutil and the (potential?) avcore/avutil
> merge, which both obviously are better done before bumping.

BTW what's the best timing for doing the changes?

I believed that deep changes are better done just *after* release,
indeed I can imagine that many users just upgrade for the release:

- Hey, these guys finally released a new FFmpeg, let's try it!

- Ouch, it breaks a lot of stuff, better to keep the ol' good FFmpeg,
  I don't have time to fix it now.
vs.
- Well, they deprecated a lot of stuff and I'll have to cleanup later,
  but it is already compiling *now*!

The same I can imagine go with distro packages, which are not usually
very updated, so releasing and bumping later looks a better strategy,
then depending projects have another year to upgrade to the new API
and cleanup.
-- 
FFmpeg = Fundamentalist & Furious Majestic Plastic Evil Guide