[FFmpeg-devel] [RFC] The Big Bump

[Reinhard Tartler]

On Fri, Feb 04, 2011 at 09:43:20 (CET), Ivan Kalvachev wrote:

> On 2/4/11, Stefano Sabatini <stefano.sabatini-lala at poste.it> wrote:
>> On date Thursday 2011-02-03 21:06:31 +0100, Reinhard Tartler encoded:
>>> On Thu, Feb 03, 2011 at 20:13:09 (CET), Diego Elio Petten? wrote:
>>>
>>> > Il giorno gio, 03/02/2011 alle 16.35 +0100, Anton Khirnov ha scritto:
>>> >>
>>> >> it's been suggested on IRC that we've accumulated enough new APIs and
>>> >> the associated cruft so the time to bump major for lavf and lavc is
>>> >> nigh. We should definitely do that before 0.7.
>>> >
>>> > I'd suggest doing this only if we can also ensure that no ff_* symbols
>>> > are left as interlib dependencies.
>>>
>>> This sounds pretty reasonable to me.
>>>
>>> As already mentioned, this is an excellent occasion for revisiting
>>> Stefanos error code concern in avutil and the (potential?) avcore/avutil
>>> merge, which both obviously are better done before bumping.
>>
>> BTW what's the best timing for doing the changes?
>>
>> I believed that deep changes are better done just *after* release,
>> indeed I can imagine that many users just upgrade for the release:
>>
>> - Hey, these guys finally released a new FFmpeg, let's try it!
>>
>> - Ouch, it breaks a lot of stuff, better to keep the ol' good FFmpeg,
>>   I don't have time to fix it now.
>> vs.
>> - Well, they deprecated a lot of stuff and I'll have to cleanup later,
>>   but it is already compiling *now*!
>>
>> The same I can imagine go with distro packages, which are not usually
>> very updated, so releasing and bumping later looks a better strategy,
>> then depending projects have another year to upgrade to the new API
>> and cleanup.
>
> I think that 2 releases should be done.
> One with old deprecated API and version 6.2 .

Who is going to work on 6.2? It is already hard enough to work on the
existing release branches.

> One with clean API and version 7 .
> Both containing otherwise the same code and features.

If that was possible, we wouldn't need to bump major at all.

> It lets distros use the old api if they use package with 6.2. At the
> same time makes it clear that any new versions would not have that
> (old) api.

What you say does not make any sense to me.

-- 
Gruesse/greetings,
Reinhard Tartler, KeyID 945348A4