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

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Le lauantaina 4. toukokuuta 2024, 23.35.34 EEST Michael Niedermayer a écrit :
> now compare to the linux kernel
> It uses mailing lists

Sorry but that is at best misleading, and at worse, plain wrong.

The top-level work flow for the Linux kernel is neither mailing list, nor web 
forge, but CLI pull/merge. The mailing list is used to discuss and to notify 
pending merge requests.

As far as I know, some subgroups still use mailing list for actual patch 
submission and review, and some subgroups have already switched to web forges. 
And there are people complaining about the difficulty and exclusivity of the 
mailing list-based flow.

> linux is not affraid to innovate to abadon tradition where new things
> need to be tried.

Well, yes, and accordingly some of the Linux maintainers have switched to web 
forges, AFAIU.

> linux is strong as ever

This is hardly a point of comparison. Linux gets support from hardware design 
and vending companies as well as from large users. Linux is pretty much an 
exception more than a rule in the overall OSS ecosystem.

If you want to compare FFmpeg, take a low-level middleware project of similar 
age and size. For instance, QEMU switched to Gitlab.com a few years ago.

> If you want to be like linux you need to be like linux.

FFmpeg cannot and never will be like Linux. This is a silly argument. Nobody 
suggested moving FFmpeg to a tiered merge flow like what Linus Torvalds uses. 
The scale and scope of Linux is just so much larger.

-- 
Rémi Denis-Courmont
http://www.remlab.net/