[FFmpeg-devel] Mending things (was: libavfilter aspect ratio) (original) (raw)

Nicolas George nicolas.george
Wed Jan 19 20:59:53 CET 2011

Le decadi 30 niv?se, an CCXIX, Michael Niedermayer a ?crit?:

Iam not sure if the people forking have interrest in keeping ABI/API compatible but in case they want to, iam definitly willing to attempt to find a consensus with them about such changes.

I was wondering how long it would take for this question to be raised.

To make things clear, I am only a very minor contributor, and as such was not involved at all in the recent events; they came for me as a complete surprise. I have some opinion about where to put the blame, but I do not have all the facts and I will try to keep them completely out of this mail.

At this time, I do not think that any long-term damages have been done. Sure, the yesterday events make the whole developer community look bad, but that is nothing a few months will not erase; the story has not even reached Slashdot yet.

If the API/ABI where to diverge, on the other hand, the damage would be several orders of magnitude more severe. One of the forked branches would surely die out in the long run, just like XFree86 died, and some of its developers would refuse to join the other branch; and either side would be a more than serious loss. In the meantime, a lot of effort would be wasted in porting new features between branches.

The result for the whole Free Software community would be dramatic.

People have shown that their anger was enough for them to take extreme measures. I think now is the time to look for a compromise, for the good of the whole project.

Regards,

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