[FFmpeg-devel] SWS cleanup / SPI Funding Suggestion

[Cosmin Stejerean]

> On Oct 17, 2023, at 7:36 AM, Michael Niedermayer <michael at niedermayer.cc> wrote:
> 
> On Sat, Oct 14, 2023 at 07:53:04PM +0200, Stefano Sabatini wrote:
>> 
>> 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.
> 
> I think there are several shades of this
> 
> The community might simply have a consensus that X should be funded.
> We achieved this both for traval and hw in all or nearly all cases.
> And quite plausibly we will achieve this too for other cases
> 
> Hypothetically the community might have a consensus some work should
> be funded but not agree on technical details.
> Here honestly i think the developer doing the work should be the main
> decission maker. She is the one doing the work, knowing the code best.
> And most likely its one of the FFmpeg team doing the work.

I think this makes sense for cases where there is easily reachable consensus. What happens when we can't easily reach consensus? For example it doesn't seem like we have consensus on funding improvements to swscale (compared to integrating a 3rd party library). Does that mean that work cannot get funded through SPI? 

This is where I think using the TC to make a decision where the community at large cannot reach consensus might be useful. It doesn't need to decide the fine technical points of how the work is done, but it can provide a useful mechanism to disagree and commit about whether the work should be done at all and provide the broad strokes (like improve swscale vs write a brand new library vs integrate some third party one).

- Cosmin