[FFmpeg-devel] SWS cleanup / SPI Funding Suggestion

[Stefano Sabatini]

On date Friday 2023-10-13 21:19:34 +0200, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> Hi everyone
> 
> I propose using 15k$ from SPI for funding sws cleanup work.
> this is substantially less than what people belive this needs (see IRC logs from yesterday or so)
> So it really is more a small price for a good deed and not proper payment.
> This of course is only available to competent developers. (exact rules or how thats determined
> would still need to be decided unless its a clear case)
> Also the exact outcome and goal would need to be discussed by the community and whoever
> does the work.
> But some goals would probably be to make sws
> * pleasent to work with
> * similar speed or faster
> * proper multithreading
> * proper full colorspace convertion not ignoring gamma, primaries, ...
> * clean / understandable modular design (maybe everything can be a "Filter" inside sws
>   that get build into a chain)
> 
> Proper payment (50k$ maybe) would be too much in relation to what SPI has ATM (150k$)
> 
> Above all, this is just my oppinion, the actual SPI funding also would need to
> be approved by the community. This can happen after a specific volunteer comes forth
> or before, whichever way the community prefers.

Leaving apart the technical details about the implementation, this
should be feasible within the SPI framework (although this would
involve some paperwork and delays due to that).

It would be useful at this point to define the process to accept the
proposal and potential candidates. We have a technical committee which
might take the lead on that and probably have the last word on it,
since "approved by the community" is a bit vague and there is the risk
that there will be never an approval "from the community" because of
diverging views, or that we get stuck at the design level.

As a start, probably there should be a design doc somewhere, discussed
by the community and finally approved (by the technical committee??)
before we present the request and candidate to SPI. In fact probably
the design doc is the first thing a candidate might need to work on.

Also I'd avoid terms such as "rewrite" or "cleanup" since they have
bad connotations, maybe let's call it "review" or "refinement".