[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH 1/2] lavf/file: Add proper support for authority in file URIs.

[Andrey Semashev]

On 11/29/18 9:47 PM, Nicolas George wrote:
> Andrey Semashev (2018-11-29):
>> It does. avformat_open_input, avio_open and ffurl_open[_whitelist] docs all
>> say it's an URL and they don't perform any conversion. So the file backend
>> should be prepared to receive a URL, with a scheme and authority.
> 
> So either the docs are slightly wrong or the code is. Do you have an
> argument to decide it is one rather than the other?
> 
> I do:
> 
>> It will probably currently fail because of the escape sequence.
> 
> Exactly. Since escaping, a very basic feature of URIs, is not handled at
> all, it is a clear indication that the paths are NOT meant to be
> considered URIs. The documentation was added much later, and made the
> same mistake you are doing now; same goes for a few private function
> names.

I condider the lack of support for escape sequences a bug, which is 
probably a rudiment of the past, when ffmpeg was primarily targeted for 
working with local files. The fact that all these functions also accept 
raw filesystem paths instead of URIs is also there for the same reason, 
only with additional benefit of convenience. Nowdays, there is one 
common interface for interacting with ffmpeg, and this interface is URIs 
(or raw local paths). There is no third pseudo-URI option, AFAICT. So, 
in my humble opinion the docs are correct, it is the implementation that 
needs to catch up.

>> Escape sequences, if needed, can be fixed separately.
> 
> That would break a lot of working applications and is therefore not a
> good idea.

If an application passes a URI and expects that it is not interpreted as 
such is already broken. I could make a patch adding support for escape 
sequences as well, but it seems you would not accept it. Am I correct?