[FFmpeg-devel] To be or not to be working with libav (was: [PATCHv3] On2 VP7 decoder)

[wm4]

On Sun, 30 Mar 2014 11:19:20 +0200
Nicolas George <george at nsup.org> wrote:

> I believe the discussion about the correct behaviour of FFmpeg developers
> with regard to libav is perfectly in-topic here, therefore I continue the
> thread. I will not be replying point-by-point though.
> 
> Personally, I tried at first to work with/for both sides. I tried again
> after VDD 2011. The result: it was made perfectly clear that my proposals
> were considered not interesting, but not before wasting my time on cosmetics
> (because obviously, Someone's opinion on how a variable should be named
> matters more than the opinion of the original author of the file, the one
> who will actually maintain the code).
> 
> After that, I stopped caring whether my changes got to libav or not. I make
> no effort to make them work, but neither do I make effort making them harder
> to merge.
> 
> The letter of Free Software and Copyleft requires me to make my changes
> available, and they are. The spirit of Free Software and Copyleft want my
> enhancements to be easily available to the community, and they are, through
> FFmpeg. If the changes do not reach libav, that is entirely due to them
> being unwelcome there.



> The only reason I still slightly care about what happens on the libav side
> is because some members of that branch have abused their double-hat as
> distribution package maintainers and forced their distribution to go with
> their side of the fork. That makes the API and ABI from that side a de-facto
> standard, even when it is actually mis-designed.

This is very true. On the other hand, some projects will become FFmpeg
only (because they don't care about Libav at all, and use FFmpeg
specific APIs), and this is where _Libav_ folks should care.