[FFmpeg-devel] SWS cleanup / SPI Funding Suggestion

[Stefano Sabatini]

On date Tuesday 2023-10-17 16:58:41 +0000, ffmpeg-devel Mailing List wrote:
> 
> 
> > 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).

+1

And we should try to prevent both later complaints ("it was decided
against my will") or block development because a single or a minority
of developers is against it.

OTOH voting/decision making should only be seeked out in case there is
some disagreement which cannot be resolved during the preliminary
discussion on list/chat, or in case there is more than one candidate
for the task.

I cannot comment about what exact party should be called out (TC vs
GA).