[FFmpeg-devel] [RFC] 5 year plan & Inovation

[Ondřej Fiala]

On Mon Apr 29, 2024 at 9:04 PM CEST, Davy Durham wrote:
> Presently do you not have to create an account on the devel mailing list to
> contribute to ffmpeg?
>
> So on the flip side, I (actually) find it just as annoying to have to
> create such accounts at every project rather than my having one account at
> GitHub (or a relatively few for other hosting sites) and can then
> contribute to literally thousands of projects without any friction.
I would disagree on the "friction" part. To contribute, you have to "fork"
the project, add your "fork" as a new git remote, push to it, and only then
can you create a pull request. In comparison, contributing using email is
literally just two simple git commands without ever having to leave the
terminal.

> Moreover now being subscribed to that list I get 50 emails a day that I
> have to wait through. Just so long as I want to contribute. Sure I can
> create rules but it is pretty obnoxious.
>
> As a casual contributor, I much prefer getting notifications about my
> occasion contributions.  But one can opt to get notified of everything by
> subscribing to the whole project.
I actually agree that the mailing list can be somewhat annoying as well,
which is why I like that on SourceHut you can send a patch to their mailing
lists without being subscribed and it's standard practice that people Cc you
on the replies. I really feel like this should be standard practice;
subscribing to the mailing list makes no sense if you only want to send in a
single patch, and it increases the effort required by flooding you with emails
which aren't relevant to you, as you say.

I personally find the mailing list much less annoying than using GitHub even
when subscription is required, but I feel like without having to subscribe
it's the most straight-forward way really.