[FFmpeg-devel] Project orientation

[Oneric]

On Sun 2020 Jul 5 20:01 +0300 Kieran Kunhya <kieran618 at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> Going back to the original point in hand.
> Many patches aren't getting reviewed and pushed any more.
> 
> In part this is because in 2020 whether we like it or not mailing
> lists are not the way to do Git based development.
> The kernel is the exception to the rule, as Linus says it has a whole
> load of grey-bearded system maintainers who are paid full time to work
> on it.
>
> For new contributors git send-email is annoying. For people wanting to
> push, the .mbox format is annoying, Gmail doesn't support it any more.
> And you can't get new contributors to start using CLI based email
> clients or run their own mail server, that's not going to happen.
> 
> A solution like Gitlab is the only way forward. It has worked well for
> dav1d, it can run regression tests on all platforms for all commits:
> https://code.videolan.org/videolan/dav1d
> 
> Merges are done with one push of a button. Yes, the branch sprawl is
> not great but it's better than now.
> It has inline patch reviews which are nice.
> 
> Whether we like it or not web interfaces are the way 95% of the world
> does Git and we have to move with the times.

As someone who recently only submitted a single, simple patch, I haven't seen 
mail-based dev as an annoyance, rather the contrary as this avoids the burden 
of creating yet another account on some website, that I'll have to manage.

There also already seems to be some automatic testing, as Patchwork send me an 
off-list mail about failing tests. (I did not set SAMPLES when running make 
fate locally as it was not mentioned clearly on the main "Contribute" site on 
the webpage. https://ffmpeg.org/developer.html .) It can probably be improved 
though.

What was frustating however, was the lack of any form of response to the patch 
for over a month, despite ml-pings.
On top of that the revised patch with updated FATE-samples had to change files 
with CRLF line endings that are not marked as such in .gitattributes. This 
prompted patchwork to be unable to apply the patch. Even though this is the 
only correct way to update these samples and left me concerned the patch might 
be being silently ignored because it fails on patchworks.

In my experience the review activity of a project is independend of its 
development workflow being mail or web based.


I also feel compelled to point out, that a switch to a web-based interface 
instead of plaintext emails can be a hurdle for devs with impaired vision, who 
might rely on customised mail interfaces, screen readers and/or braille 
displays as a Web-page is more complicated in that regard (especially with js).
While I myself am fortunate enough to not needing to rely on such a setup, I 
personally know devs (not working on ffmpeg afaik) that do.


Regards
Oneric