[MPlayer-dev-eng] 0.90 release plans and others

[D Richard Felker III]

On Mon, Jan 20, 2003 at 12:54:01PM +0100, Arpi wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> > > 8. Leave project. (*)
> > > 
> > > *: not a joke. i've spent _all_ of my spare time in last 2 years on mplayer
> > > development, maintaining, testing, mailing, bugfixing etc. I'll give away
> > > the maintainer job after 0.90 (anyone interested? i hoped that Alex will
> > > take it but nowdays he's also about leaving the project :().
> > 
> > I have long feared that you would eventually burn out.  Seems like it is 
> > finally the case...
> > 
> > How about just unsubscribing from -users and doing only the fun bits of 
> > MPlayer development?
> 
> Of course i'll leave all users lists, but i'll keep my eyes on -dev-eng.
> And - as i wrote - i have plans on a new player, from scratch, for testing
> some ideas. Maybe some code could be ported from it to main mplayer later.
> 
> But I think it serious: i _have_to_ stop maintaining of the current code.
> Actually I hate to refuse so many patches just because they are ugly hacks
> or (imho) useless features. Or because i don't understand that code or
> because i don't have time/hw/etc to test. Users probably want them!
> In the last months i felt that my maintainer work slows down development
> instead of improving it. Imho mplayer needs a more free cvs policy now.

I disagree. IMHO the best thing about mplayer is the way you maintain
it, not putting up with nonsense and shitty code. The users who want
that crap can go use Xine. Most serious mplayer users understand that
it's better because it does things well rather than with slow/limited
broken code.

If you're leaving, that's that, but I hope whoever takes over will
keep doing things the way you did.

> But it's only one of my reasons (this leaving project idea is not new, as
> Gabu said i have it since a year, but i always decided to stay - now i won't).
> The more important reason is that i'm not so interested in reviewing silly
> patches (esp. that i'm unable to test most of them), fixing them and
> commiting them. I want to work on more interesting things: research.
> Ie. trying out new ideas of a-v sync correction, deinterlacing and so on.
> Unfortunatelly the current mplayer code is so bloated - if i want to do any
> bigger change somewhere, i meet tons of globals, hacks, side-effects and so
> on. It's impossible to do any changes on interface, without major rewrites
> and many months of bugfixing & testing following that.
> So i want to drop this bloat, and restart from scratch, by reusing the good
> parts (like postproc, libmpcodecs, parts of libvo/ao etc) but with a new
> core and removed the hacks & useless features. I want to separate UI
> (including OSD, input (key, lirc etc) handling etc) from the core.
> But before starting it i need some holiday: work on non-mplayer
> projects.

That was the idea with libvo2, and it never happened. :( Rewriting
from scratch is always clean and feels like a good idea, but making it
happen is another matter. :(

Rich