Re: Discussing defaults (Was: [gentoo-dev] Re: [gentoo-commits] gentoo-x86 commit in virtual/ffmpeg: ffmpeg-9.ebuild ChangeLog ffmpeg-0.10.2-r1.ebuild)

[Alexis Ballier]

On Mon, 11 Feb 2013 17:22:16 +0100
Peter Stuge <peter@×××××.se> wrote:

> Alexis,
>
> Alexis Ballier wrote:
> > All of this because ~10 people cannot work together, well, really,
> > thank you :)
>
> Do you have experience from being in a similar situation? You are
> being quite judgemental.
>
> There are absolutely situations where people so different that
> cooperation simply can't work. It's pretty lame, but unless you
> yourself participate at least on the same level as everyone else
> (on both sides) you really don't get much of a say.

Yes, sorry, I now realize what I wrote is understood differently from
what I meant. I was not criticizing the people, but rather the current
situation. Luca is the one to ask if you want to know more about this,
certainly not me. I am simply a consumer annoyed of having to write
more and more complicated code to support both sides.

I am aware that the split did not come out of nothing, and considering
the vast majority of core FFmpeg developers by that time are now
involved in libav, libav is likely to be the side of 'those who are
right'. However, as I said, maybe with an incorrect tone, I do not
think libav ignoring what happens in ffmpeg to be a pragmatic attitude
and believe it is mainly hurting applications trying to do their
best in supporting both, and users wanting the extra bugfixes or featues
from ffmpeg or the better review process from libav. The critic was
directed towards this, which I believe should be orthogonal to the
reasons of the split.

Finally, I would really love to see some will in reopening the
discussions, be it to merge back (I think that's very unlikely, but
let's not lose hope) or to decide that there is nothing more to be done
and find a sane way out of this lose-lose situation (soname change, or
anything better).

> It's easy to tell people to "stop fighting, just get along" - but
> I believ that intentional fighting is quite rare. It's more likely
> about trying to make one's point.
>
> That requires communication, but communication is not always
> possible. (I don't mean transmissions back and forth, I mean
> desire to understand the transmissions.)
>
> For a long time I idealized open source as being an ideal community,
> where communication always worked because everyone wanted it to. But
> that's unfortunately not at all the case.

Yep, thanks for shaking me on this, it seems I should reread twice
before hitting send on an email since I fell in the same trap. Again,
apologies if what I wrote has been taken personally, esp. to those that
tried their best to avoid the split.

[...]
> > I consider FFmpeg superior, but can understand there are different
> > opinions, however, if this is to lower the tree quality
>
> Quality is not a very helpful metric, because it means completely
> different things for different people. Some people value code
> readability, maintainability, and correctness very high, other people
> value having a new idea halfway implemented and released even if it
> only kindasorta works and is not at all reliable and not on par with
> previous parts of the code.
>
> I see a tendency in myself and in others to not care about what
> happens on the inside when thinking merely as a user. I see many many
> people complain about the insides when they are not happy with how it
> performs. I very rarely see people actually dig in to help fix up the
> insides. The same pattern exists in pretty much all projects that I
> know of, and it is quite natural - there are more users than
> developers.

Quality here is: Everything that works with FFmpeg works with libav,
and vice-versa. Once that is true, then the default can be what is
deemed better. In this precise case it is controversial, so once
everyone has expressed his arguments and reasons then default should be
what the majority prefers (and here, it seems the majority goes with
libav).

[...]
> > libav should realize they are the actual fork (this is now pretty
> > clear since the takeover failed and ffmpeg didn't collapse...) and
> > also rename their libraries so that the internal libav/ffmpeg
> > fights would not affect their users anymore and projects could use
> > what they think best...
>
> Unless libav considers the API too broken to still be functional I
> don't see the point of differentiation. A little bit of competition
> can be good overall even though it is more stressful for both sides.
> The most important thing is what I asked for already -
>
> That users inform themselves, and make informed decisions.

For distributors it does matter: if we start to have libav-only or
ffmpeg-only packages then users get the choice on what package to use,
not the implementation. If there is a differentiation, then upstream
decides what they think is best and that's about it. It would not kill
competition, rather the contrary I believe.

Alexis.