[FFmpeg-devel] Plugins architecture

[Lynne]

On 11/08/2025 21:43, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> Hi Lynne
> 
> On Mon, Aug 11, 2025 at 09:22:26PM +0900, Lynne wrote:
>> Recently, the issue of plugins was raised.
>>
>> Michael pushed a patch to enable out of tree branches to be freely added to
>> FFmpeg. I did not very much like the option of having officially-endorsed
>> source plugins, as to me, it moved all the burden of maintenance to FFmpeg
>> maintainers.
> 
>> The commit was reverted, with the tentative agreement to open a discussion
>> on the nature of plugins we would like to have.
> 
> You force pushed the revert with standing objections 12 minutes
> after a "binary choice" you created.
> And without warning that you would push something

I think I was being very clear.
Your motive for pushing a huge project policy change that affected all 
maintainers after hardly a day of review was less clear.

 > <Lynne> for a third time, I am really not comfortable with this
 > mechanism being open, nor being merged after barely a day. I would
 > like to know whether you want to approve this temporary revert, after
 > which we can discuss this on the mailing list, or would like to accept
 > my addition of this being only available for official repositories.> 
<michaelni> We can discuss, that was my suggestion, theres no plugin 
from a non ffmpeg developer, not one so also not one with dlopen and 
none hiding dlopen and none breaking contract
> <Lynne> okay, so option 1?
> [13:48] <Lynne> its a binary choice.You said you wanted a discussion, which I took as agreement to my 
response, and now you have an actual discussion on this project-wide 
policy change.

We are all very busy volunteers. Asking us to periodically inspect all 
projects included as source plugins for LGPL/GPL violations after an 
unreviewed policy change by a single maintainer is overtly wrong.
I know you have a position that's more favorable towards plugins, and 
that this was a step towards that. But to me, this was by far the worst 
type of compromise.