[FFmpeg-user] man page vs. online documentation

[Jim Worrall]

On Dec 1, 2011, at 7:57 PM, Carl Eugen Hoyos wrote:

> Jim Worrall <coniophora <at> gmail.com> writes:
> 
>> Is it better to get the latest snapshot?
> 
> If you are not a distributor but a user, you are strongly encouraged to use
> current git head (instead of a release): It always contains more features and
> less bugs.
> 
> If you believe that this is not clearly explained on 
> http://ffmpeg.org/download.html please suggest improvements.
> 
> Carl Eugen


Thank you, yes, I am a user (well I have hardly used it, just have fun
trying to figure it out).  I just got what I think was the latest snapshot:
ffmpeg version 0.8.7.git-1fd6924  and the
man page with it pretty much matches the online doc.

I should have read that page you linked to a little more carefully.  That said,
I couldn't suggest improvements unless I understood it better.  It does
explain that "releases" are snapshots of certain times, but why they are made
or how they are different from regular snapshots of that time I don't know.
One sees references to a lot of terms on the mailing list: snapshot,
git master, git head - it would be nice to define those, indicate which are 
synonyms if any, and have some way to identify them as such on the actual 
repository.  But I certainly understand also it is up to fairly ignorant users
like me to learn as much as possible on their own.  As you can tell, I don't
use git.

Thanks for the help and the work on the software.
Jim