[FFmpeg-devel] Allergy against "distribution" maintainers, was: [PATCH] define _BSD_SOURCE for bktr.c

Reimar Döffinger Reimar.Doeffinger
Sun Dec 14 21:34:40 CET 2008


On Sun, Dec 14, 2008 at 09:11:37PM +0100, Reinhard Tartler wrote:
> Reimar D?ffinger <Reimar.Doeffinger at stud.uni-karlsruhe.de> writes:
> 
> > Which may also help understand why some of us are very allergic to
> > "distribution" maintainers hoarding a set of mysterious and undocumented
> > patches
> 
> Please note this:
> 
> Distribution maintainers very often are not as knowledgable of ffmpeg
> internals as ffmpeg developers. This very often results in "substandard"
> patches, which when submitted or catched up by upstream very often get
> refused in an rather unfriendly ways.

This is not about "substandard" patches, and I very much dislike the way
you quoted me in the subject.
What I objected to is _hoarding_ a set of _mysterious_ and
_undocumented_ patches.
Note that the quality of patches does not even come in here at any point.
It also has not that much to do with FFmpeg, none of the distributions
seem to have much if any requirement or tradition to document or even
somehow organize that patches, and how will you be able to find out if
some patch is still necessary when the only person who has understood
the purpose no longer maintains the port?

> Very often distros also do not share the same requirements of
> quality of changes which results in larger piles of patches in the
> distribution package. Which makes the whole mess only more frustrating.

It would also make it even more important to have a way to properly
manage the patches.
Also, there is the possibility of just reporting the issues on the bug
tracker (possibly with the patch as an additional hint), either it gets
fixed or at least it is documented.




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