[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH 00/26] Major library version bump

[Marvin Scholz]

On 21 Jan 2023, at 17:51, Anton Khirnov wrote:

> Quoting Michael Niedermayer (2023-01-20 03:05:09)
>> PS: iam not sure i fully understood the reason behind why versions should be
>> set to "wrong" values during some period, so as always i might be missing
>> something
>
> The reason is that after the major bump, the API and ABI are declared to
> be unstable for some period, so people can freely
> - break ABI, e.g. by reordering struct members
> - modify API added during the instability period in an arbitrary way
> without a new major bump for every such change, that would be normally
> required.
>
> My concern is that the instability period is quite long and there is
> very little indication for our users that they cannot depend on the
> ABI/API being stable. So I'm proposing to introduce some mechanism to
> make this more visible for our callers.

I agree that a better way to know when I have an "unstable" version of
ffmpeg would be great. Even as someone loosely following ffmpeg dev
it is not clear to me when instability period ends and if we are
currently in it or not.

(I mean, I was lucky enough to notice this email now this time, but
that was pure luck…)

>
> Alternatively, we could just not have an instability period at all.
>

Not having any instability period at all seems like a bad idea.

> -- 
> Anton Khirnov
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