[FFmpeg-devel] [GSoC] FFserver further development direction

[Josh de Kock]

On 2018/04/26 11:56, Nicolas George wrote:
> Josh de Kock (2018-04-26):
>> Generally, adding more things to public API is a bad move
> 
> I do not accept this statement as is. Please justify it.
> 

What I mean by this is making private fields public is generally a bad 
move. They were initially made private for a reason, and if you suddenly 
need to modify them outside then you must ask: What does this new code 
do differently to all the other code which makes it require a private 
field?

It's a matter of consistency, if some new code could be written without 
requiring a private field to become public then this is better.
It's also a matter of complexity, the API is less complex if there are 
less public field. If it wasn't better then please submit a patch which 
makes all private fields public. Of course, this doesn't apply to 
everything sometimes there are genuine reasons for new API fields to be 
added but *generally* a smaller API leads to a better experience. I did 
say that in this case I was unsure.

-- 
Josh