[FFmpeg-devel] [RFC] The Big Bump

[Ivan Kalvachev]

On 2/4/11, Stefano Sabatini <stefano.sabatini-lala at poste.it> wrote:
> 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.

I think that 2 releases should be done.
One with old deprecated API and version 6.2 .
One with clean API and version 7 .

Both containing otherwise the same code and features.
It lets distros use the old api if they use package with 6.2. At the
same time makes it clear that any new versions would not have that
(old) api.